14 days left until DanceWeekend!
Our countdown to DanceWeekend’22 continues with Peggy Baker Dance Projects and Katherine Semchuk who will be performing Saturday July 16 at 1:30pm at the Fleck Dance Theatre.
Peggybakerdance.com
FB: @PeggyBakerDance, @ksemchuk
IG: @peggybakerdance, @kchuk, @rootingrouting
TW: @PeggyBakerDance
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself/your company?
Katherine: I am an eastern European contemporary dance artist whose practice is fuelled by an intense passion for movement, heightened states of presence, and connection to community. I teach, perform, improvise a lot and coordinate a platform called “westside movement sessions”. My life is very much informed by and dedicated to dance at the moment, but when I am not inside of it I find myself outdoors or with my pen to a piece of paper scribbling down whatever my mind is trying to sort through or dream about.
I have been lucky to collaborate with artists across the country and find myself bouncing between Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton. The relationships I have formed inside of dance are extremely precious to me and I am eager to see how the community will continue to grow and interweave itself through different disciplines and cities over the next few years.
I first met Peggy in the dance studios at the University of Alberta in our home town Edmonton, Alberta. She is one of the first people that I felt saw me when I danced and when I encountered her my experience of movement changed almost immediately. She shared tools with me that enabled my sense of autonomy as an interpreter and they’re still informing my evolving artistic practice to this day. It has quite literally been a dream come true to work with her on a solo “excavation” (as we call it); my time in and out of studios with Peggy have been filled with conversation, consideration and laughter. This process is a gift!
What will you be sharing at DanceWeekend’22?
To be here
Katherine Semchuk in collaboration with Peggy Baker a dancer whose life spills into the silent and empty space, like ink onto a blank page Dance artist Katherine Semchuk will share an excerpt of a new work entitled to be here, a solo arising through her dedication to journaling, physical practice, and improvisation, all employed with specificity and intentionality in the making of a dance through a deeply collaborative relationship with veteran solo dancer and choreographer Peggy Baker.
concept, creative process, choreographic composition, direction: Peggy Baker
movement invention, performance: Katherine Semchuk
How has the pandemic shifted your work as a professional dance artist?
Katherine: The pandemic quite literally nudged everyone inwards — it didn’t so much change my work (maybe this is because I do not make a lot of my own work), but it changed how I work and how I bring myself into my art. The pandemic catalyzed my investigation of my Self, my own artistic practice and my role inside of the community. I built incredible bonds with people/artists through conversation and never-ending “pivoting”. I spent a lot of time journaling, trying to get through “The Artist’s Way”, being in dialogue with others from afar and improvising in my basement. All of these things have contributed to a stronger sense of what I believe in and what I find joy in. This has changed the way I bring myself into rooms, how I show up for others and what I choose to put energy into. At some point during the pandemic, I began seeing myself as an artist and not just as a dancer… and that was really cool to feel.
Please share what you are most looking forward to at Dance Ontario’s return to live performances at DanceWeekend?
Katherine: A sense of community — people experiencing performance together in the same physical space, and being able to take each other in again. I look forward to the energetic exchange that is inherent in live performance and that feeling of going inwards while simultaneously sending energy towards. I look forward to seeing/sensing and being seen/sensed.
Do you have any up-coming performances/workshops/events you would like to share?
Peggy Baker Dance Projects: Beautiful Renegades A new play about 1970s Toronto, dance, and the trouble-makers whose art changed them both. Peggy has commissioned Toronto-based playwright Michael Ross Albert to write Beautiful Renegades, a play inspired by the anti-establishment politics that helped shape contemporary dance in 1970s Toronto. In development since 2018, the work includes new choreographic distillations from 6 ground-breaking choreographers of the era: Elizabeth Chitty, Margaret Dragu, Lily Eng, Louise Garfield, Johanna Householder, and Jennifer Mascall. Directed by Eda Holmes and designed by Gillian Gallow (sets and costumes) and Debashis Sinha (sound), Beautiful Renegades features a company of 6 actors and dancers including Sarah Fregeau, David Norsworthy, Erika Prevost, Jarrett Siddall, Shauna Thompson and Anne van Leeuwen.
“This play is inspired by an artist-run dance centre called 15 Dance Lab that operated in Toronto between 1974 – 1980. When it first opened just two dance companies dominated the Toronto scene: The National Ballet of Canada and Toronto Dance Theatre. At 15 Dance Lab, the dancers rejected popular expectations for dance and aligned themselves with leftist politics and the avant-garde in visual and media arts. It was THE social scene for Toronto’s burgeoning independent dance milieu.” – Peggy Baker
Beautiful Renegades takes us back to the time when Peggy was just starting out as a dancer; while the work itself marks the final production of Peggy Baker Dance Projects.
In 1 or 2 sentences, what does dance mean to you?
Katherine: Dance is a means to be present; an entanglement of our inner worlds with the space around us. It is a connection to pulse and groove, and the ground we find ourselves on.
Photos by Kylie Thompson