Lar, the Dance Enthusiast - 2018

In December of 1980 – at the age of 28, but still very raw and incomplete as a dancer – I moved from Toronto to New York City to join the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. For the previous two summers I had taken intensive workshops with the company, and the encounter with Lar’s dances smashed my world wide-open. His ebbing and flowing unison passages create the vivid, startling and powerful impression of natural forces at play, while episodes in which every dancer has different steps coalesced as surging choreography teeming with deep musical pleasures and woven together by rich, ribbony movement lines flowing through and among bodies. Awe in the face of the deep mysteries, and the image of a vibrantly diverse collective emerge robustly within each work. His dancers declare themselves as distinct and distinctive individuals who combine forces toward a higher purpose.

Throughout my first year in Lar’s company I felt overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work and teetered on the verge of collapse. I was intensely conscious of holding the steps of Lar’s dances in my body, of the responsibility I had in learning them, of how much they were affecting me. The extraordinary people who danced for Lar at that time – Doug Varone, Nora Reynolds Daniel, Christine Wright, Ronni Favors, Rob Besserer, Nancy Colahan, Charles Martin, Harry Laird, Mia Babalis, Mark Morris, Sylvain Lafortune, Kathy Casey, Rick Michalek, Jeanne Solan, Leonard Meek, Bruce Woods – became my closest friends, and still populate my dreams.

Lar was intense in the studio, very charged up physically. At the beginning of rehearsal, he would enter the studio side of his West 18th Street loft with a huge cup of coffee that he kept at the ready and used to fuel himself. Depending on the dance, he gave instructions or was up on his feet moving at a ferocious pace while we scrambled to copy him. Every so often he turned his head and asked, “Who got that?” A couple of dancers excelled at picking up material this way, and as long as they kept up he would keep going. On occasions when a dancer got frustrated or touchy, and admonishments of “don’t go there” failed, Lar would lift them up, turn them around, and put them down somewhere else. Rehearsals were demanding and efficient. There was never any marking. There were pillars near the back wall of studio, and it was great to hug one when you were really beat; this cool, solid pillar against your overheated sagging body. The loft had been a sweatshop before Lar got it and after more than 10 years of rehearsal the floor still occasionally coughed up sewing needles.

All through the 1980s we did a huge amount of international touring, a lot of it sponsored by the State Department: Canada, Mexico, England, France, Italy, Germany, Luxemburg, Poland, Romania, Greece, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bali, Japan. For six weeks in 1984 the company was in residence at the choreographic centre in Angers, France where Lar choreographed Concerto 622. We lived and worked in the same building, and when we arrived there was a mad scramble to choose bedrooms, frantic bartering among us to swap lamps and chairs, all of us rearranging our rooms to deconstruct the conformity. We shopped and cooked together, we trained and rehearsed for impossibly long hours, and we sat in the kitchen every night talking long after the rest of the town was asleep. Dancing at Carnegie Hall we had to run down a staircase through a hallway and back up stairs simply to cross over from one side of the stage to the other. In a small theatre in Greece where our music was run from a tape recorder in the wings, the machine was accidentally unplugged in the middle of a dance and all of us on stage were caught in a holding pattern – literally running around in circles – until the sound eventually resumed and we found our way to a cue in Steve Reich’s circular music. At the Berliner Ensemble’s theatre we danced against the gritty pull of a painted floor cloth, and in Lisbon on a stage so steeply racked we felt as though we were careening toward the front and crawling toward the back. In Mexico City we danced in one of the most opulent theatres I have seen anywhere in the world. Diego Rivera murals on the lobby walls, tiers of gilt boxes, embroidered velvet upholstery, exquisite carpets and magnificent chandeliers. The luxurious dressing rooms, one for each of us, were like first class cabins on an ocean liner. We took oxygen in the wings whenever we left the stage – so strange, liking drinking air. In theatres around the world, grand and shabby, everywhere you turn – looking into a mirror, climbing a staircase, opening a door, putting your hand on a barre – you feel the resonance of the past. History offers itself as a groove worked in wood, as paint and fabric faded by light, as beams and floorboards settled in by the vibration of music, voices, footfall. Lar’s work left its own imprint everywhere we danced.

The experience of performing a great work of choreography that you understand and appreciate and have mastered is a piece of heaven. It sets up a kind of resonance that reorganizes your structure and alters your destiny. Dancing for Lar was of the utmost consequence in my life. North Star, Marimba, Exultate Jubilate, Cavalcade, Les Noces, A Brahms Symphony, Big Shoulders, Of My Soul – are part of my body, part of my past certainly, but also part of who I am yet to become.

Peggy Baker, Toronto,  2018

Concerning Trish Beatty - 1998

As a teenager I dreamed of becoming an actress, I think mainly because plays offered up such a wealth of varied, striking, and complex images of women. In 1969 I won an acting prize at an Edmonton high school drama festival and I used the bursary to attend a month long theatre seminar in Drumheller. Our daily movement class was taught by Patricia Beatty, a 32 year-old dancer and choreographer who was a founding co-director, just a year earlier, of Toronto Dance Theatre. Undaunted by the group of unruly and inexperienced teenagers before her, Trish led us in a thorough and rigourous modern dance class based in the technique of the legendary American dance artist Martha Graham. I later wrote of this pivotal experience:

I was deeply affected, not only by the aesthetic and physicality of the movement material, but also by the eloquence and articulation of Trish’s body and by the language that she used to describe the experience of dance. She spoke like a poet, her riveting, thunderstruck images exquisitely nuanced. The class sustained an undercurrent of ritual: stillness, deeply considered and deeply felt movement, silence, a kind of ecstasy. Much of the dancing took place down on the floor where we twisted and coiled, bowed and arched, carving and slashing and pressing the space with our torsos and limbs. It was a revelation for me. I felt utterly connected, fluent and inspired. I felt that I had found myself.

Indeed, from that point on I knew with absolute certainty that I was a dancer. I didn’t need to wonder whether I could become a dancer, and I have never suffered from any uncertainty about engaging in my work.

***

I owe my life in dance to Patricia Beatty, a founding co-director of Toronto Dance Theatre, and wrote about that crucial meeting in the forward to Toronto Dance Theatre 1968-1998: stages in a journey, published by Captus Press in 1998:

I met Patricia Beatty in 1969 at summer theatre school in Alberta where she had been brought in to teach movement for actors. She was a breathtaking beauty, thin as a reed with long dark hair, a 32-year-old dancer fresh from New York City. I was a very young 16-year-old from the suburbs of Edmonton and I spent those few weeks of classes in a state of rapture. Trish taught us to dance sitting and rolling on the floor, her torso and limbs curving, twisting, arching, coiling, and exploding. She swayed and billowed, pressed, pushed, pierced, dug, scooped. She spoke like a poet about earth, weight, the roots and trunks and limbs of trees, the cycling of seasons, the shifts of the heart. She instructed us to plie in second with the bearing of a Chinese Emperor, to lift our arms as though they carried a weight of heavy fabric, or to hold them as if they rested on the arms of a huge chair, to turn our heads with a terrible truth held in our chest, to dig furrows with the plow blades of our heels. And the seed of every movement defined in this endless stream of images needed to find its beginning in the core of our bodies: the spine and pelvis. I was being introduced to the technique of Martha Graham, and I was being taught by a great artist. In dance I discovered the language in which I am most fluent, eloquent and connected, and that discovery catapulted me into my future.