Peggy Baker Dance Projects – Confluence

Reviewed by Paula Citron

It is a shock to the system to sit through Peggy Baker’s show. The dancers actually dance.

Confluence is the umbrella title that covers two new works by Baker (the solo Earthling and the trio Coalesce), and the duet Armour by New York’s Doug Varone. The connecting thematic threads are American author Lewis Thomas’s meditations on biology, particularly his 1974 classic The Lives of Cells, and Montreal sculptor/videographer Sylvia Safdie’s insect imagery.

Perhaps there is a retro feeling to the concert. Baker and Varone are not avant-garde creators. What the works collectively possess, however, is a meticulous sense of shape and pattern.
In short, it is an evening of intense physical imagery.

Confluence is defiantly modern dance. The dancer’s body is idealized in these works as an instrument of beauty. One arm sweep becomes eloquent poetry. No matter how melancholy, how relentless, how troubled the themes, dance itself is the radiant medium of expression.

Confluence continues at the Enwave Theatre until Feb. 28.
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Confluence
Peggy Baker Dance Projects
Choreography by Peggy Baker and Doug Varone
Performed by Kate Holden, Sahara Morimoto, Sean Ling, Larry Hahn and Baker
At Enwave Theatre until Feb. 28, 2010
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