Peggy Baker

Dance Choreographer

Peggy Baker is acclaimed as one of the most outstanding contemporary dancers of her generation. Born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1952, Ms Baker began her professional career in Toronto, in 1974, as a founding member, and later artistic director, of Toronto’s Dancemakers, where she participated in more than 50 premieres by Canadian choreographers and contributed three works to the repertoire. She toured internationally as a prominent member of Lar Lubovitch’s celebrated New York company throughout the eighties and joined Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris for the inaugural season of their White Oak Dance Project in 1990, subsequently forging important creative relationships with Montreal’s Paul-André Fortier and New York’s Doug Varone through numerous performance projects.

Ms Baker made her debut as a solo artist in 1990, her work distinguished from the outset by collaborations with extraordinary creators and performers. Among them: choreographers Sarah Chase, Molissa Fenley, James Kudelka, Tere O’Connor and Tedd Robinson; composers Michael J. Baker, Chan Ka Nin, Ahmed Hassan and Ann Southam; dancers Margie Gillis, Christopher House, Sylvain Lafortune and Susan Macpherson; actors Jackie Burroughs and Michael Healey; visual artists and designers Ina Levytsky, Janet Morton Caroline O’Brien, Marc Parent, Kurt Swinghammer, Jane Townsend, and Peter Vogel; Amici, Arraymusic, The Modern Quartet, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under Jukka-Pekka Saraste; instrumentalists Henry Kucharzyk, Shauna Rolston, Debashis Sinha, James Sommerville, Robert W. Stevenson, and on-going since 1991, pianist Andrew Burashko.

Her concerts have been presented at major festivals and dance centres across North America, Asia and Europe including Danspace, The Kitchen and Symphony Space in New York; the Luckman Centre in Los Angeles; Jacob’s Pillow; the Copenhagen International Dance Festival; the Time Festival in Ghent, Belgium; MoDaFe in Seoul, Korea; the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa and in three seasons at L’Agora de la danse in Montreal.

Ms. Baker is the recipient of numerous awards including a Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario, the 2006 Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, three Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding Performance (Why the Brook Wept, 1996; loin, très loin, 2000; Portal, 2008), and two for Outstanding Choreography (Portal, 2008 and Radio Play with Denise Clarke, 2009), a 2002 Cadillac-Fairview Salute to the City Award, the Toronto Arts Council’s 2002 Margo Bindhardt Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Calgary.

Recognized as one of the modern dance world’s finest teachers, Ms Baker was director of dance for the Contemporary Arts Summer Institute at Simon Fraser University from 1991 – 1994. She teaches regularly at universities and professional training programs throughout Canada and the U.S. including the Juilliard School, the School at Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, NYU, UC Santa Barbara, York University and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She is the first ever Artist-in-Residence at Canada’s National Ballet School, appointed in 1992. Irene Dowd, Patricia Miner, Christine Wright and Risa Steinberg, her primary teachers since the mid-eighties, continue to exert a powerful influence on her development.