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Peggy's Journal Hello from the Canadian Rockies and the exquisitely beautiful and creatively charged Banff Centre! It is my great good fortune to have been invited by Lindsay Fischer, the inspired and accomplished director of the centre’s new dance program, to join the artistic staff he has assembled to work with a company of 26 extraordinary dancers over a period of five weeks, culminating in a series of six performances. I have been staging Julio Lumo, a work for thirteen dancers that I choreographed in 2000 to a pair of songs by the (now defunct) Toronto world music band Maza Meze. I had forgotten how complicated this dance is, very quick and exacting, and all of the music in cycles of seven. The original dance included two children, but this is an all-adult version, and quite different, since some major revisions were required. Will any of you be in or around Banff the week of August the 4th? I’ve also been working on a new dance for myself while I’m here, using a tough and emotionally raw score for cello, marimba and tape by Christos Hatzis. The composition is titled In the Fire of Conflict, and it premiers in the Walter Hall cello recital of Denise Djokic as part of the Toronto Summer Music Festival on August 5th. The score includes dramatic use of spoken word folded into multi-layered surround sound. I’m working in the studio with a MIDI demo, and it will be amazing to hear the music with live cello and marimba, and a sound system that can handle the power and complexity of the tape part. I will be down to the wire with the choreography, expecting to finish it just in time for my first rehearsal with musicians on August 2nd. Back into the studio tomorrow morning… June 16th, 2008 Radio Play lives! Three previews and two performances into its short life it has made itself known as a funny, sad, sweet, surprising piece of performance that confuses distinctions between dance and theatre, fiction and biography, sentimentality, high art, play acting, and post modernism. The audience laughed, they cried; were by turns appreciative, baffled, elated and incredulous. Lee Anholt created a gorgeous super geometric world though the magic of lighting and Sahara Morimoto proved herself a steady, sensitive and accurate sound technician. (Since I can’t seem to go anywhere in my dance life without Sahara as my dancer and studio assistant extraordinaire it seemed a natural choice to simply fold her into the tech crew.) Richard McDowell’s score sounded pin-drop-perfect in the theatre, and following the second Ottawa performance a delighted theatre buff expressed his delight at recognizing Richard’s inimitable counterpoint of melody, sound effects and vocals without even reading the program. Creator Denise Clarke continued to tweak and coach right to the end, and Larry and I will both miss her like crazy until we are reunited prior to a run at Toronto’s Young Centre in November, and visit to Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo first thing in the new year. May 14th, 2008 Larry Hahn and I are midway through the second week of our final rehearsal period with the virtuosic creator/performer Ms Denise Clarke, working toward preview showings at Dancemakers Centre for Creation the last week of May, and our premiere as dancers with a lot to say June 8th and 9th in Ottawa. Do I sound nervous? I console myself with the following thoughts
The development of this project with Denise has been truly remarkable. She is a tireless worker, and an inspiring and demanding director. She is a totally gorgeous dancer; tall, super flexible, precise, soulful and quirky. She dazzles Larry and I with her take on the characters she has created for us and patiently and expertly guides us through the necessary steps of making them our own. Today we roughed through from just after the prologue through to the end, minus the top secret, pivotal dance scene that we roughed in spontaneously, and just for the fun of it, propelled by gales of laughter and Richard McDowell’s fabulous and funky sound design. Can’t wait for tomorrow… April 3, 2008 A bright morning in Philadelphia where I am teaching a daily class for two weeks through an organization called Dance Advance. I am staying in lovely brownstone in the Art Museum neighbourhood. The streets here are tiny one-ways with room for a row of tightly packed parked cars and just enough space to squeeze by in moving vehicle. The sidewalks are narrow and mostly given over to trees and terracotta urns of flowers. The buildings are right up against the city sidewalk with just three high steps leading the front door. My little home feels like it could be it Amsterdam, narrow and deep with a back garden and a terribly steep staircase leading to the second floor. My classes are taking place in the main studio of Philadanco, which is full of good vibes. Philadelphia is beautiful and bustling cosmopolitan city teeming with African Americans so it has been a surprise, and also a disappointment, not to have a single black dancer in my class. There is a core group of about ten dancers who appear every day. The only man in class has made a pilgrimage from Calgary, (well, Canmore). We all are into a beautiful work groove, which is inspired and sustained by the music of Tim Motzer, a brilliant guitarist who creates recorded loops to play on top as we go along. Part of this residency, which was set in motion by eighties dance world buddy Bill Bissell, is a whopping 3 hours of studio space for me every afternoon. I’m using it as an opportunity to develop movement material for an upcoming work with cellist Denise Djokic. Christos Hatzis is writing a score for Denise, and though I haven’t heard a note of it, I am getting rolling by creating some raw material that will be ready to manipulate and develop once I get the music. I brought a lot of cello music with me and everyday I have different recording playing through as I work. So far I’ve begun each session by working on new ideas. When I run dry, I review what I made the day before and then simply add on the new material. At the end of yesterday’s rehearsal I began cutting moves that stuck out as being clichéd or habitual and it felt great to clean them out. During that last half hour of work I got a glimmer of something new beginning, the feeling that there is a new dance waiting to be discovered in my body. So I am out the door and off to the studio, along my gorgeous little street, lined with trees bursting into flower. March 6th, 2008 Does this happen to anyone else? The date for something you are going to do is so far in the future it feels like it will always be on the horizon. You’re working to get ready for the day to arrive, but it stays firmly established in the future tense. Then, very suddenly it seems, the day arrives and it feels a little surreal. So, March 6th, 2008. Today as I write it and ever after, in the past! A Woman by a Man, the new Kudelka duet with Sean Marye, goes up tonight in Toronto on a far bigger stage, and that makes it quite a bit easier to negotiate the spacing. We have two new musicians joining pianist Andrew Bursahko - Benjamin Bowman on violin and cellist Shauna Rolston. They worked together for the first time on Sunday, I joined them Monday to clarify the choreographic context for the music and we had two days in the rehearsal studio prior to last night’s dress rehearsal. This group of musicians has a different approach and chemistry than the Montreal gang, and it is amazing to me how much room for interpretation there is within a classical score. Louis Laberg-Côté and Sahara Morimoto are dancing Yang, and as the performances have drawn nearer I’ve given them more and more time to work on it without me. I think it will be a very surprising opening to the concert. The first act closes with Jessica Runge in Brahms Waltzes, and she is sublime. Portal is slipped between these two earlier works picking up on the vocabulary of Yang but finishing on a very quiet note before the Brahms. A nap this afternoon, and then into the extended time warp of successive performances. This morning dancer Michael Sean Marye, pianist Andrew Burashko and I boarded an early morning train to Montreal. The platform was jammed, and with every car packed to the gills we were unable to find choreographer James Kudelka, also with us, until we reached our destination. (It turned out that the super punctual Mr. Kudelka had been earlier, and not later, than the rest of us in getting to Union Station.) A quick trip to the hotel to drop off our bags, and then immediately off to a rehearsal hall at Place des Arts for a music rehearsal of Shostakovich’s 2nd piano trio, the score for Kudelka’s new duet, A Woman by a Man. Andrew, who had originally suggested the music to James, has taken the opportunity of this trio to work with a pair of Montreal musicians known to him by virtue of their stellar reputations. Violinist Olivier Thouin and cellist Yegor Dyachkov are two of the most exciting and accomplished classical musicians in Montreal. They know each other very well, and are expert at sustaining a funny and very charming banter with one another that keeps the rather intense work light and energized, immediately dispelling any tension in tackling the challenges of the music. Although they have never met Andrew before the three are instantly comfortable and focused. Their command of their instruments, their experience as chamber players, and the intelligence and instinct that they bring to their interpretation of the work allows them to engage with the score and with one another in mutually exciting and inspiring ways. James sits on his own, facing the musicians as the audience will, and Sean and I sit together behind the players and over to one side, quietly thinking through our parts. Each of the musicians has played this piece before and they have slightly different ideas about how to approach it, what to bring out. The choreography requires the music to build and push in very specific ways, and the second movement needs to be faster than any of the musicians had considered in the past. For a full three hours the musicians work with one another, and with James, to develop interpretation that both honours the music and supports the intention of the choreography. Sean and I are hearing so much more than we ever got from the recording we worked to in the studio. The music is magnificent, and we are blown away by how much the musicians can accomplish in a single rehearsal! It’s just Saturday, and we will be with these musicians every day now until we open on Wednesday and then have four performances together. This will be a great ride! December 16, 2007 My fabulous lighting designer, Montrealer Marc Parent, no longer goes on the road with me. (He’s the father of two young children, in-house with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, plus juggling a busy freelance schedule with a multitude of theatre and dance companies in Montreal). So over the past couple of years we have become very resourceful when it comes to preproduction. What’s required is a residency in a crewed and equipped theatre so that Marc can become fully acquainted with the choreography in a stage space, experiment with possibilities, and ultimately conceive, execute and document a design. It’s crucial that he’s working with the assistance of the lighting supervisor who will go on the road with me so that all of the technical information gets communicated fully and accurately. To that end I jumped on the 5pm Via Rail to Montreal last Tuesday, (11/12/07), ready to go with repertoire for three different concerts that are slated for the new year. When I say different I don’t just mean different cities - we’re doing Calgary, Montreal and Toronto – I mean different programs for each place we’re going. Calgary gets two premieres, Molissa Fenley’s Dreaming Awake and my own Portal, plus Krishna’s Mouth, and it’s the only concert I’m dancing on my own. Montreal gets the premiere of my new James Kudelka duet, A Woman by Man, with Michael Sean Marye, (who is tremendous!), plus Portal, and the gorgeous Andrea Nann in Unfold. For Toronto, where Unfold has already been presented twice, the program will be Portal and the Kudelka duet plus Brahms Waltzes, danced by the magnificent Jessica Runge, and Yang, with hot shots Louis Laberg-Cote and Sahara Morimoto. That is a huge amount of repertoire. I don’t go onstage with this rep for the first time until January 23rd, Sean and Andrea don’t go on until February 20th and the Toronto cast has until March 6th, but I needed to be able to mock up the whole works, in costume, December 12th through 14th! Now add to that, the only other dancers available to go to Montreal for the December preproduction with Marc were Sahara - one half of the Yang duet, as well as being an understudy extraordinaire who was ready to go with Brahms Waltzes and Unfold - and dancer Larry Hahn as a cover for Sean. The three of us were flying by the seat of our pants, but we made it all happen! The dancers were at Circuit-est warming-up and rehearsing in the morning, while the technicians readied the theatre, joining forces onstage at Maison de la Culture Frontenac in the afternoon. Marc completed three brand new designs, (boy oh boy, is the lighting for Portal amazing!), plus reconstructing and finessing his designs for the rest of the rep, and lighting supervisor Lee Anholt is all ready to go out on the road with us. I turn my attention and energy now to the final stages of rehearsal, the demands of getting the dancing where it needs to be and the complexities of the live music, especially for the Kudelka.... December 5th, 2007 Was it buying my 2008 agenda yesterday that inspired a head start on New Year’s resolutions and kicked off this sudden desire to finally get an on-line diary going? Or is it the extra 25 minutes I somehow won myself this morning that insist on being put to good use? Either way, or a little of both, my website is now host for my musings and misadventures in the form of an early 21st century blog! The last week and half has been focused mainly on rehearsals for my new James Kudelka duet, A Woman by a Man. Originally slated for a Montreal premiere in February of 2007, this 25 minute long duet was choreographed working seven days straight in November 2006. Dancer Larry Hahn, (the fabulous Doug Varone company veteran), and I struggled to keep up with James’s breakneck pace, but by day seven we were both pretty dazed and exhausted, and when we shot a video to be used as a basic record of the dance, we could not yet perform or in some cases, even remember all of the steps. The duet got put away for a few weeks while we both worked in New York with the Varone company and then we dove back in. Two weeks before the premiere, just as we peaked in mastering the dastardly duet I fractured a bone in my right foot and the entire enterprise had to be abandoned. Coming back to the work a year later, that original day seven video is not only an indispensable record of which foot, what comes next, and who goes where, it is also a rich source of hilarity and humiliation. Especially since Larry is in the studio this time around as a rehearsal director rather than a dancer, and that first hopeless looking run-through has now been fully revealed to the magnificent Michael Sean Marye who is taking over as my partner. Sean managed to learn the whole doggone dance in five days, mastering things as he went along and making me wonder why my own first rehearsals were so overwhelming. James was in the studio with us for a whopping four hours on Tuesday and he worked his masterful, magic way through the whole piece from beginning to end, clarifying shape, dynamics, facings, focus and details of partnering. We are dancing to a tremendous score for piano, violin and cello by Dimitri Shostakovich, and James expanded on the choreography of the third and fourth movements somewhat, taking into account the placement and presence of the musicians. Sean is off to China and Mongolia this Sunday in an all Kudelka program with Coleman/Lemieux & Compagnie, so we don’t work together again until just before Christmas. In the meantime, I’m off to Montreal to do pre-production with primo lighting designer Marc Parent, with Larry standing-in for Sean. But more on that later… |
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