Crimson Coast Dance Society and PEGGY BAKER Dance Projects presents: coalesce & armour

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Saturday, January 18th, 2014
7:30 PM

Join this award winning choreographer/performer for an evening of evocative beauty

More about the show from Peggy Baker:

From 2003 to 2007 I spent part of each year as a guest dancer with New York�s Doug Varone and Dancers, involved in the original cast of an evening length work entitled Dense Terrain that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Doug was working from a series of essays from the Lewis Thomas classic The Lives of a Cell concerning contact and communication among social insects. Just as Doug was embarking in his project, Montreal visual artist Sylvia Safdie offered me a group of her films as the catalyst for a dance. These films featured individual beetles and groups of ants, their actions altered by slowing them down, looping and reversing them so that they looked just like dances. When Doug offered armour, a duet from Dense Terrain, for my repertoire I brought it together as a companion piece with my own trio, coalesce, commissioning an electro-acoustic score by Toronto composer Debashis Sinha unites the dances sonically.

coalesce is a complex and unpredictable inquiry into the nature of communication that muses on alternate sensory and movement pathways for eliciting interconnected action. It is danced by three superlative performers: Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto and Andrea Nann. armour pairs me with Bessie Award winning, veteran dancer Larry Hahn in a spare duet that entangles us as a couple caught up in a primal act of connection.

I present these companion pieces as a two-part Audio Action Tour. Act one is 30 minutes, during which I speak directly with the audience, illuminating the concepts and methods that set the dances in motion. I share related materials � still projections, film footage, excerpts of the Lewis essays � and have the dancers, (who are wearing practice clothes), demonstrate aspects of the choreography to illustrate its structure and vocabulary. Following an intermission, in a second act that lasts 45 minutes, coalesce and armour are performed, fully costumed and lit.

This program was presented in New York City as part of the 2012 Harkness Festival and will be staged at the University Calgary in January of 2013.

The Audio Action Tour is a huge amount of fun for the audience. The guided tour of the inner workings of the dances, and the explanations of the deep connections they have to one another, are a powerful entry point for enjoying and appreciating the performance.