reviewvancouver: coalesce & armour

Peggy Baker took her audience on a personal journey tonight, opening up the intellectual pathways of her creative process. coalesce & armour, an audio action tour is a unique and thoughtful presentation. It is exciting to be given the opportunity to look into the creative process behind the building of a piece, to see the visual stimuli that motivates an artist and to have the movements within the piece deconstructed so as to understand what the artist wants to say.

coalesce & armour is a seminar as well as a dance. Peggy Baker draws her audience into her world with the opening sequence of the evening and in so doing she instructs as well as inspires. The evening brings all the elements of Peggy Baker’s career into a harmonious whole. She is a dancer, choreographer and teacher whose love of dance and search for new ways to express movement coalesce with this project.

She is joined in this celebration of dance by Larry Hahn, Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto and Andrea Nann. Each of these artists are very accomplished in their own right. The level of their commitment to coalesce & armour could be seen in the disciplined movement of each segment and in the expression on their faces. The unity and intensity of their movements to the pulse of the sound track was magnetic.

Peggy Baker and Larry Hahn danced armour. It is an evocative and intimate piece choreographed with slow and precise movement. coalesce was danced by Sean Ling, Sahara Morimoto and Andrea Nann. This is a longer and more complex piece that draws the audience in with the staccato pulse of the sound track and the interaction between the three dancers. Both of these pieces incorporate the instruction in the seminar that Peggy Baker opened the evening with.

The costume design (Jennifer Dallas) and the lighting design (Marc Parent) were instrumental to the dialogue of this piece. The sound accompaniment (Debashis Sinha) is the perfect companion to the world of images that Peggy Baker derived her inspiration from. Every artist searches for the spark that can be molded into another expression of their craft. Sylvia Safdie, artist and Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell were the inspiration that motivated Baker to create coalesce & armour. This production is unique in its intimate portrayal of Baker’s search for meaning in movement.