Volume 25 Issue 6 - March 2020

Beat by Beat | In with the New
Gender Fluidity in
Music and Dance
WENDALYN BARTLEY
Peggy Baker Dance Projects: Collaborations between
choreographers and composers have played a significant part in
the creation of some of the most loved pieces of contemporary
music. The classic example is, of course, the partnership between
composer Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets
Russes that resulted in the scores for The Firebird, Petrushka and
The Rite of Spring. Among the first of the contemporary dance
companies to form in Toronto were Toronto Dance Theatre in 1968
and Dancemakers in 1974, and both companies quickly began to
work with contemporary composers, many of them local. One of the
early company members of Dancemakers was Peggy Baker, and in
1990 she went on to establish Peggy Baker Dance Projects. Over the
years, she has received much praise for her collaborative partnerships
with composers such as Michael J. Baker, John Kameel Farah, Ahmed
Hassan and Ann Southam as well as with performers Andrew
Burashko, Shauna Rolston, Henry Kucharzyk and the Array Ensemble,
among many others. Over the last five years, contemporary vocalist
innovator and music creator Fides Krucker has collaborated on all of
Baker’s new works, bringing to their collaboration her expertise in the
creation of non-verbal human sound textures and her commitment to
an emotionally integrated vocal practice.
Baker’s latest work, her body as words, will be performed March 19
to 29 at the Theatre Centre. For this piece, Baker has drawn together
a unique intergenerational ensemble of dancers and composer/musicians
who have taken up the challenge of addressing questions of
female and gender identity. I invited one of the composer/musician
members of the ensemble, Anne Bourne, who herself has collaborated
on past projects with Baker, to have a conversation with me about
her contribution to the piece as a composer and how her distinctive
performance style of combining vocal toning while playing the cello
will contribute to the overall musical score.
In choreographic notes that Bourne shared with me, Baker describes
the ideas that provide the context for the music in this adventurous
piece. “From my earliest creations,” Baker writes, “a pervasive,
underlying subtext of my work has been the embodiment of varied,
authentic and relevant images of women.” Coming of age during the
second wave of feminism, her ideas of female identity were formed
largely through reading Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and other
key authors of that generation, so she was shocked to discover in early
2019 that the translation of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was incomplete,
and that the translation by H.M. Parshley was heavily influenced
by his own personal views. When she discovered the unabridged 2009
translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, “I was
knocked over by the power of de Beauvoir’s philosophical text and the
epic proportions of her proposals.” She found herself reassessing her
own life from the point of view of an older woman now caught up in
feminism’s third wave; what she learned from this updated version
was a key element leading to the creation of her body as words.
Another key influence in the work is Baker’s fascination with
mythic stories. “As a child, I was haunted by Grimm’s fairytales in
which girls were required to endure terrible trials in order to save
their brothers and fathers from imprisonment or death. By such
stories have young girls been initiated into the web of patriarchal societies.”
In her body as words, these images of femininity are brought
into sharp contrast with spoken text excerpts from The Second Sex in
which de Beauvoir deconstructs these damaging stereotypes.
Contemplating the questions Baker’s notes posed regarding female
identity in this current time and place, Bourne asked “What is it we all
Anne Bourne
share?” and with that question comes her answer: “The sound of the
earth we all walk on, and the weather that troubles us.” During our
conversation, she elaborated further on what this might sound like.
“I want to make sounds that hold the space or open the space almost
as if they were light. The cello tones may be at times lyrical, and
at times transparent.” She envisions improvising using a cycle of
tones that are closely voiced, as well as experimenting with difference
tones, which are sounds that arise acoustically on their own
due to the combination of other tones sounding simultaneously. She
describes these difference tones as sounds that “emerge almost like
a response to what you are sending into the space.” She will improvise
a sonic environment, with cello and voice, listening to the underlying
pulses, and articulating the dancers’ gestures. She is also
considering using specific tonalities to differentiate between various
combinations of dancers or scenes and is also imagining the possibility
of incorporating the sounds of a windstorm. When she imagines
female identity, she thinks of it like “an arc of a storm that moves in
and out of a quiet space but has a powerful range.”
Bourne emphasized, during our conversation, that much of what
will become the piece is yet to unfold through the rehearsal process
and the collaboration with the two other composer/vocalists Ganavya
Doraiswamy and Fides Krucker, each of whom will bring their own
unique vocal approach and way of improvising to the performance.
Her interest in creating a shared space through sound also defines her
views on the nature of collaboration. The potential is there, she says,
“to honestly express our experience of being in relationship to each
other. Rather than defending our positions, trust that you can just be
all that you are and create a piece of art together. When we open
and listen to each other, a kind of change may arise that we haven’t
found yet.”
Bourne’s work over the past few decades as a close collaborator
with Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening process is a key
component to her understanding of how to create a shared space
through sound, and will bring an important perspective to the entire
collaboration. Another of the influences she will be bringing into
the creative mix is the ideas of author Lynn Margulis as expressed in
her book, Symbiotic Planet. Margulis makes the point that all beings
currently alive on the planet are equally evolved, and that “since all
living things are bathed by the same waters and atmosphere, all the
inhabitants of Earth belong to a symbiotic union.” For Bourne, this
describes a way of listening, and will influence both the sonic decisions
she will be making and the way she approaches improvisation
and the collective process.
As mentioned earlier, Fides Krucker has been a collaborator with
Peggy Baker’s company for the last five years and in that time has
created four vocal scores for the dancers. Krucker was just beginning
this exploration back in 2015 when I interviewed her for the
April edition of The WholeNote about Baker’s piece, locus plot. At
22 | March 2020 thewholenote.com