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[Dance reviews]

True story
Peggy Baker’s mute conversations

BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Peggy Baker started her performance at Concord Academy last Thursday in the most unassuming way, walking across the studio floor to a corner where some costume bits were hung on the ballet barre. She sat on a chair and put on a pair of big, possibly purple shoes, tying the laces with an extra tug. After that, nothing about the proceedings was ordinary.

Baker works at high intensity all the time, in the longstanding tradition of American solo dance-mime artists. All four short pieces on the program seemed to arise from some story or stream of images in which she was totally immersed. There’s a paradox here. The mental continuum that feeds this performing is made up of things most of us would think too affecting or too insignificant to share with anyone — momentous events and minutiae, encounters, dreams, trauma, dialogues we relish or regret. But the dance-mime artist tears down the psychological screens and re-creates everything, transforming what’s private into a public performance.

Baker’s distinction is that her movement narratives aren’t literal or linear. She transforms herself from one fully charged idea to the next without any transition. You breathe with her, expand and recoil, swagger and subside, without knowing why. The transaction, artist to audience, is almost pure affect.

Baker’s first piece, a true story, began with an oversized gesture sequence. Standing in place, she wrenched her arms apart so forcefully I feared she might crack her breastbone. That’s the first move I remember. Then there was a long sequence of pushing, stamping, tender nods, retreats, rejections, appeals. With each change, her whole body, hands, face, even her scalp, it seemed, filled up the gesture with an emotion. She was telling this intense story to the audience, but sometimes it seemed she was also interacting with another person only she could see.

She did the whole sequence again, quietly telling the story in words, too, something about being 13 and working out how she felt about her father’s second wife. Just using the names for this person — mother, parent, mom, stepmother — brought forth an adolescent’s supercharged response.

For Strand, pianist Mark Ryser played a piece by Ann Southam that seemed to be based on a simple tone row. In the rather bleak atmosphere created as the same notes recurred in different relationships and rhythms, Baker went through another long series of gestures. Some of them were very specific. She was praying, she was walloping a baseball. Some were more generalized, some downright mysterious. She looked anguished one minute, hesitant the next. There was a flash of anger. She scribbled in the air, she traced what might have been a mountain view, she crammed a handful of something into her mouth, she distributed something with open hands, then took something back as she closed a fist to her throat.

I imagined some solitary woman with tremendous pent-up feelings and no way to discharge them. I mean, Baker showed us the feelings but the woman remained oppressed. She abruptly sliced one flat hand against the other and the music stopped.

In an excerpt from loin, très loin (choreographed by Paul-André Fortier), she stood down near the audience in the beam of a flashlight. She’d do a short phrase, then step to the side in the dark as the flashlight was passed along the front row of viewers. At each of five or six positions, she touched her body differently, showing us parts of it or outlining it, gripping one hand with the other. Then the lights came up and she slashed through the space, making karate-chop moves and sound effects to match. It was the only time in the evening that she traveled at all, and though scary, it came as a relief.

Finally, she did some faux ballet and some modern-dance distortions as Ryser played John Cage’s Piano Music #2 on and inside the piano. The piece was called furthermore, and it was like a coda, a reminder that we’d been with a dancer and a musician after all. At the end of it, he was bending over the keyboard and she curved over his back and hugged him.

Answering the audience’s questions in the après-show show, Baker revealed some of the inner scripts she’d been working from. All four pieces had some literary or autobiographical background that I’d rather not have known. Her performing is so powerful, I needed to counter it with my own inner stories. And none of your business what they were.

Issue Date: August 2-9, 2001