Canada’s National Ballet School Teacher Training Program, graduation guest speaker, June 2019

I was so touched to be invited by the NBS Teacher Training Program class of 2019 to speak as a guest at your graduation. I am guessing that the few classes some of us did together this winter struck a chord with you. It was very special for me to step into your world – so distinct in its goals, pacing, pressures, and pleasures – and to connect with you through the immediacy of class: sharing a cluster of concepts and phrases for our exploration and consideration. My eye was tuned to each of you as you negotiated the material, and I too explored and considered that material in relation to the entry points and barriers, the quandaries and insights it might be presenting. When I am teaching I aim to align myself with my instincts, with my capacity for empathy, and with the ever-evolving body of experiential and acquired knowledge that guides my words and actions.

Forty years a teacher, I still get nervous before starting out with a new group, still suffer bouts of self-doubt when I question the relevancy of my teaching, still spend an inordinate amount of time on lesson plans, still encounter students whose talent, passion, and aspiration undoes me. I no longer interpret my insecurities, self-doubt, efforts to improve, and awe of my students as an argument against my teaching. I now appreciate those challenges as crucial to my development and the value of what I have to offer.

The rich and demanding program you have just completed has given you access to a vast body of knowledge and physical practice that has been culled and honed over centuries. That body of knowledge, and the thinking around it, is still not complete or perfected, because it is in a constant state of becoming. Dance is a living art form, it must be taught and learned in real time, and each individual involved must embody the knowledge subjectively. The evolution of dance will continue as far into the future as any of us can imagine. Dance is a crucial aspect of culture, key to experiencing ourselves and one another, key to posing questions about who we are, and how we relate to each other and to the world.

Every dancer builds their career on the foundation of their training, and that training must serve their body, their mind, and also their soul. It must deliver them over and over again to the truth of the moment as a creative impulse, a physical experience, and a performative act. I have built an expansive, thrilling and deeply satisfying career on the foundation of my training, and like you, I am indebted to my teachers for their rigorous lessons, patient guidance and inspiring influence. I want to share my teachers’ names with you. These are the people who gave me a way to become a dancer, and I feel their presence in my dancing, and in my teaching, every day: Patricia Beatty, Mary Hinkson, Ethel Winter, Kazuko Hirabayshi, Yuriko, Jane Dudley, Martha Graham, Milton Myers, Lar Lubovitch, Risa Steinberg, Maggie Black, Jocelyn Lorenz, Irene Dowd, Annabelle Gamson, Doug Varone, Mark Morris, Patricia Miner, Andrea Nann and, to this very day, Christine Wright.

There is the art form and the technique that is its foundation, but there must be a teacher. Without a teacher the form is quite simply out of reach. Teaching is a joy and a responsibility; it is exhausting, energizing, frustrating, and rewarding. You may go on to teach at the studio where you trained in your youth, along faculty who were once your teachers, at a school you establish yourself or in a place you never imagined you would live. Wherever you go, your work is cut out for you: everywhere there are people, young and old, who desperately want to dance!

Congratulations one and all! I join everyone here in wishing you the very deepest pleasure and satisfaction in the life’s work that lies ahead.

– Peggy Baker (2019)

Canada’s National Ballet School 2016 yearbook

I moved to Toronto, from my hometown of Edmonton, in the fall of 1971 to study with Toronto Dance Theatre, and the first place I lived here was the house that still stands at 441 Jarvis, directly across the street from the main entrance of Canada’s National Ballet School, NBS. But NBS was situated on Maitland St. back then, and in the summer, when the big double doors of the Quaker Meeting House (now Currie Hall) were opened wide, I would climb the steps and watch the dazzling dancers taking class. At that time I could not have imagined any circumstance that might take me through those doors and into that rarefied space. Ballet and modern dance were considered by many then to be thoroughly incompatible in terms of training, aesthetic, and choreographic intent, but radical shifts in perspective, physical practice and collaboration were already taking hold throughout the dance world, and within a few short years we all found ourselves entering a new era in the history of our art form.

I made my first visit as a guest teacher – at the invitation of the newly appointed Artistic Director, Mavis Staines – in the 1988 – 89 school year. I arrived thinking that I would teach as I had been taught, using the traditional class structures and materials of modern dance as I had learned them. I quickly realized that it was the movement principles, and not the technical forms, that were vital. I rethought my own training to distill those principles and then recomposed my class as a series of etudes relevant to the young, highly gifted and intensely motivated ballet students training within the super charged learning environment of NBS. I have been navigating an exhilaratingly steep learning curve throughout my entire time at NBS, and the discoveries and innovations made on this continuing teaching journey have affected every other aspect of my dance life. The insights I have gained through the extraordinary young dancers that it has been my privilege to teach at NBS informed and supported the full arc of my solo career, from 1990 through 2010, and continues to serve as a fundamental source of exploration and deepening understanding in relation to my choreographic endeavors.

I teach my classes for grades 10, 11, and 12 in the early evening, on stage in the Betty Oliphant Theatre, where my students have been inspired by the brilliant music of pianist Craig Ziebarth, and also by some of Toronto’s most exciting percussionists including Debashis Sinha, Robin Buckley, and my late husband, Ahmed Hassan. NBS students have danced alongside my assistants including Kate Holden, Sarah Fregeau, and most significantly Sahara Morimoto. The learning has gone deep for all of us. We are not just working on dance – we are all in the throes of discovery and creativity in relation to ourselves and the world around us. We are in a state of being and of becoming. Before I teach class, mornings and afternoons I am at work in studio 5B, and if I look east out of the windows onto Jarvis St. I see the old house that was my first home in Toronto, and I marvel that I seemed to know exactly where I needed be all along.

– Peggy Baker (2016)

graduation address / Peggy Baker / Canada’s National Ballet School / June 2013

It is a great honour for me to speak today and I thank you sincerely for extending me this privilege. The 2013 graduating class of Canada’s National Ballet School is made up of a magnificent group of individuals. Your sincerity, courage, inspiring accomplishments, and ardent aspirations are a gift to the world we all share. It has been a joy and an honour to be one of your teachers.

The dance milieu is a multigenerational matrix in which every single participant plays a crucial role, and in which the generations roll over ceaselessly. Each of you joined the dance world the moment you identified within yourself, that you love and need to dance. Our art form cannot thrive without the engagement of individuals of all ages, representing every stage of life’s journey: the spontaneity of childhood, the aspirations and determination of youth, the ardent ambitions and innovations of the young adult, the ever deepening commitment and virtuosity of those in their prime, the perseverance and sublime artistry of middle age, the perspective and hard won wisdom of the elder. I hope that you will embrace the poetry that epitomizes each chapter of your life, because what lies ahead is constant change and recalibration. The huge shifts you have experienced from childhood through adolescence and youth to the brink of your adult life will not cease. What the future promises is ever more change through a succession of profound transformations that will deliver you again and again to the core of your self and to the threshold of something brand new.

I want to share three beautiful stories that highlight the powerful cross-generational relationships so essential to our art form. Two of these anecdotes are from a New Yorker article by Joan Acocella, who accompanied Mikhail Baryshnikov on a trip to his hometown of Riga, Latvia in 1998, just before his fiftieth birthday. He had not been back since the age of 16. The first story is one I have told in class, but here is the direct quote of his teacher, Juris Kapralis:

“Very serious boy. Perfectionist. Even in free time, go in corner and practice over and over gain. Other boys playing, Misha studying. And not just steps, but artistic, an actor. He is thinking all the time what this role must be. I remember once, Nutcracker. He was thirteen, perhaps. I was prince, and he was toy soldier. After Mouse King dies, Misha relax his body. No longer stiff, like wooden soldier. Soft. Our ballet director ask him, ‘Who say you should do this?’ And he answer, ‘When Mouse King dies, toys become human. Toys become boys. Movements must change.’ He devise that himself. Small boy, but thinking.”

This portrait of Baryshnikov as a child reveals the essence of his artistry: the self-directed practice, an imagination stirred by the choreography, the fluid interconnections between instincts and action.

The second story involves the same teacher, 34 years later, as witnessed by Joan Acocella, on this most difficult and emotional visit for Baryshnikov:

“The happiest I ever saw him in Riga was in a studio in his old school, rehearsing works for the upcoming program. Perched on a folding chair, watching him, was the director of the school, Haralds Ritenbergs, who had been the leading danseur noble of the Latvian state ballet company when Baryshnikov was a child. (“To us he was like Rock Hudson,” Baryshnikov says.) Next to Ritenbergs sat Juris Kapralis, a handsome, bighearted Latvian whom Baryshnikov had as his ballet teacher from age twelve to sixteen. What must these men have felt? Here was the dear, small, hardworking boy they had known, now almost fifty years old and the most famous dancer in the world, rehearsing before them steps such as they had never seen. There should have been some shock, some acknowledgment of the break in history – of all the years when so many things had happened to him, and to them, to make their lives so different. But there was none of that. What I saw was just three old pros working together. Baryshnikov would perform the steps. Then he and the two older men would huddle together and…discuss the choreography. Yes, Baryshnikov said, this piece, no music. Yes, here I do arms this way, and he demonstrated a stiff, right-angled arm, the opposite of what ballet dancers are taught. I looked for raised eyebrows. There were none. The older men nodded, watched, asked questions. To them, it seemed, he was still their hardworking boy, and his business was their business, dancing. Baryshnikov showed them his shoes – jazz shoes, Western shoes – and Ritenbergs and Kapralis unlaced them, peered into them, poked the instep, flexed the sole. They were like two veteran wine makers inspecting a new kind of cork. Whatever feelings passed among the three men, they were all subsumed into work. Now, as had not happened when Baryshnikov showed me his old house or the hospital where he was born, time vanished. He had returned home at last, but home wasn’t Riga; it was ballet.”

This episode, late in Baryshnikov’s career, reveals an artist whose serious intentions and appetite for creative adventure never waned. And it presents a picture of older artists who are still filled with curiosity and awe, still learning, engaged in the ever-unfolding present.

One of my teachers in New York was the great solo dancer Annabelle Gamson. Annabelle’s mother had died when she was a young child, and her father, wanting his daughter to have a powerful female presence in her life, enrolled her in dancing lessons with Julia Levine, a protégé of Isadora Duncan. Annabelle thrived in these classes, eventually becoming a dancer on Broadway where she originated leading roles for choreographer Agnes DeMille. When she married, she retired to raise her children.  Then, in her mid-forties, she was seized by the inspired idea of bringing Isadora’s dances back to life for the concert stage. These historic works had not been performed for close to fifty years. Annabelle debuted an evening of Duncan’s solos in a triumphant concert at Carnegie Hall, and for the next twenty years she dedicated herself to Duncan’s legacy, reconstructing choreography and recapturing a physical and expressive technique that might otherwise have been lost to us. 

The forward motion of the present has now delivered each of you to the threshold of your adult life. All of the dancing that has come before you is your heritage; yours to draw from, carry forward, challenge, live up to, and build upon. Your individuality, artistry and vision are fundamental to the vitality and advancement of our art form. Your dance lives weave the threads of the past securely with those of the future.

To the 2013 class of Canada’s National Ballet School, to your families whose love and support has allowed you to pursue your dreams, to the magnificent teachers who have nurtured you, and to our visionary artistic director, Mavis Staines, I offer my congratulations and my admiration. I wish you every joy and satisfaction in the years ahead.

– Peggy Baker (2013)

Peggy’s speech for the 2013 convocation ceremony for the Faculty of Fine Arts/Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University

Chancellor McMurtry, President Shoukri, Dean Singer, teachers, graduates and guests, it is my very great pleasure to join you at this convocation for the Faculty of Fine Arts, and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University. I am awed to be in the company of so many accomplished and inspiring individuals, and deeply moved to be the recipient of an honorary doctorate. This award is a bold declaration by York of the vibrancy, relevance, and value of the Canadian dance milieu, a community I am privileged to be a part of. My remarks today derive from the continuum of influences and experiences that have shaped me, and reflect above all, the impact of my parents, expanding outward from that primary source to encompass the breadth of my life as an artist.

I’m one of six children, born into a middle class family in Edmonton, in 1952. My parents are both inspiring teachers and they championed play, imagination, creative learning, and the outdoors as the focus of childhood. My siblings and I played dress-up, built forts, put on plays, and penny carnivals. I loved swimming, skating, riding my bike, and dancing. I danced everywhere: in the living room, down city sidewalks, in classes that met once a week, and in community recitals. I played the recorder with my grade school class, took piano lessons, and sang in a church choir. At school we practiced reading aloud and also silently, which amazed me! We worked on penmanship, spelling, and the rules of grammar. We learned things by heart: times tables, poetry. I remember my excitement and wonder at learning that words could be unleashed into an explosion of possibility through metaphor. I took art lessons in the basement of an old downtown mansion that was the original home of the Edmonton Art Gallery. Each week our lesson began with our teacher taking us upstairs to view and discuss a painting. She taught us how to look for secrets and pleasures hidden inside of the images on the canvas.

School writing assignments expanded to include short stories, newspaper articles, essays, and all kinds of poetry. I loved the pleasure of scrawling and scribbling through the reckless mess of a first draft, and also of wrestling with the words and images to try to reconcile them within the concise architecture of each literary form. I began to discover unexpected and thrilling possibilities for womanhood in biographies, fiction, and plays. I became more and more serious about theatre, excited by the complex female characters so essential to the action. By luck, I won a bursary in a high school drama festival, and traveled away from home to attend a summer theatre school. One of our daily classes, called Movement for Actors, was actually an introduction to the serious and demanding dance technique of Martha Graham. My teacher was Patricia Beatty, a professional modern dancer recently returned to Canada from New York City, and a founding artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre. She spoke like a poet, describing how we were to move, and guided our bodies with her hands. Her dancing was fierce, feline, with actions emanating from her torso. She moved with weight and fluidity, utterly connected to her body and to the moment. The image she presented went beyond all possibilities for female expression I had ever encountered. Her lessons opened outward to encompass all and everything that moved and excited me. Set in motion according to her instructions, I had the extraordinary sensation of having discovered my essential nature. I felt both transformed and yet perfectly myself.

Within a few years I had become a student at the New York school of Martha Graham. One day, in the middle of class, Miss Graham suddenly stopped us and demanded, “Do you want to be dancers?” Some of the students around me averted their gaze; I looked directly at her. The room seemed to vibrate. “Declare yourself to be dancer now,“ she commanded, “ Say I am a dancer, and then – show me!”

Two other powerful encounters with giants of the dance world were moments of reckoning that hinged on questions of self-definition:

In my late twenties I discovered the groundbreaking work of choreographer Lar Lubovitch. Two deeply inspiring summer intensives with his extraordinary company had left me suffering a kind of heartsickness knowing that I would never be good enough to join his group. Out of the blue, I got a call from Lar inviting me to an audition for his company. Intimidated and horrified by the thought that he would discover what a bad dancer I was, I told him I couldn’t make it. Lar called a second time saying he had decided against an audition, but wanted to spend an afternoon working with me to be sure I was right for his company. Again, I lacked the courage to accept. But, unbelievably, he called a third time. “You need to do this,” he said, “We need to work together.” He gave me the address of his New York studio, and told me when we’d begin. I toured the world with the Lubovitch Company for the next decade, becoming, through Lar’s generous encouragement and demanding mentorship, the dancer he had imagined.

I worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov for a year as part of The White Oak Dance Project. One day in rehearsal, struggling with a turn, I said something like, “This is hard for a modern dancer.” “A modern dancer,” Misha responded, throwing up his hands, “Peggy, there are only two kinds of dancers: good dancers and bad ones”. We roared with laughter.

***

Whether through dance, psychology, filmmaking, mathematics, music – what each of us hopes to discover is a pursuit so aligned with our nature that it draws us fully into a matrix of interconnectivity, meaning, and purpose. What promotes that likelihood?

My father recently forwarded me a letter to the editor of the Edmonton Journal written by a young man, graduating from Harvard with a masters degree in architecture. He was decrying the termination, after 50 years, of the Edmonton Public School Board’s Enriched Music Program. Thanks to this program he had studied violin for 11 years, and his letter eloquently detailed the crucial impact this experience had on him. Gifted academically, his high marks in school were effortless. But he was a mediocre musician, and practicing his instrument taught him what could be achieved through commitment and hard work. The music program was optional and extracurricular, and it was his first experience of the joy of participating in a group activity freely chosen by all. There was no grading, and he discovered that something could be, in his words, “unquantifiable and yet immeasurably valuable”. His family might have been able to afford private lessons for him, but those lessons would never have given him the chance to play in an orchestra, where he revelled in the intensity of competition and collaboration. He identifies his serious and joyful studies in music as crucial to his ambition to excel and contribute through work he loves.

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You lucky graduates of these two faculties with the word ART in the descriptor, your connection to creativity and the potency of culture can nourish every aspect of your life if you take it to heart. If you consider work and creation to be one and the same, you will engage with imagination, daring, and integrity in everything that you do. The qualities of action that are conducive to collaborative creativity – curiosity, sincerity, respect, humour, empathy, patience, commitment – will enhance every relationship you enter into. The spirit in which, as an artist, you share ideas, resources, opportunities, and the work you create, is a model for generosity in any circumstance.

We share the knowledge that making and experiencing art feeds the soul; that culture is a perpetual work-in-progress integral to the fabric of society; that culture is wealth that we share. But newly graduated, these are early days in your chosen field. How will you harness your energy and your gifts, to make the greatest contribution? In the introduction to her wonderful collection of essays, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Joan Acocella writes:

“When I moved to New York in 1968, I fell in with a group of artists whom I was often awed by. “What will they become?” I thought. They were so brilliant, so bold. And as the years passed, I found out something my elders could have told me. There are many brilliant people – they are born every day – but those who end up having sustained artistic careers are not necessarily the most gifted. Over time, our group lost many of its members – to bad divorces, professional disappointments, cocaine. The ones who survived combined brilliance with more homely virtues: patience, resilience, courage.”

***

Whether you feel yourself to be functioning within the mainstream, a subculture, or in the vanguard; whether you identify yourself as an outsider, a renegade, a stabilizing force, or an agent of change; you are a member of society, and you have an impact on society. We are all living lives of consequence. We have each assigned ourselves a role and we are literally building a world together. Work for good. Burnish your brilliance with effort, empathy, imagination, integrity, and also with patience, resilience and courage.

– Peggy Baker (2013)