since then

concept, choreographic composition, direction: Peggy Baker
movement invention: Peggy Baker with the dancers
dancers: Jacqueline Ethier and Sarah Hopkin
original score: Debashis Sinha

lighting design: Gabriel Cropley 

"My maternal grandmother was a suffragist, a woman fully engaged in the first wave of
feminism that won most Canadian women the vote by 1940 – shamefully, Inuit women did
not achieve suffrage until 1950 and indigenous women until 1960. Born in 1952, history
swept me up in the second wave of feminism, in which access to the pill and legal abortion
allowed women to chart their own futures, bolstered by the landmark writings of Simone de
Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer, and informed by the
indispensible handbook, Our Bodies Our Selves. Now, a third wave of feminism, #metoo,
tears back the curtain on the sexual abuse of girls and women that is so deeply entrenched
in our society, and continues to push forward the cathartic struggle for women’s rights as
human rights.
Now that I am long past menopause, Simone de Beauvoir would describe me as being
beyond ‘the grip of the species’, and from this vantage point I have a profound appreciation
for the pivotal moments that changed the course of my life. since then arises out of the
retrospect my age allows me. I have insight now that I wish I could share with my younger
self. There are conversations about love, sexuality, loss, and old age that I would dearly love
to have with my late mother. There are truths about my life that I have never confided, and
need to find the courage to share and discuss. I offer this dance as an invitation for
conversations among women."
PB

"… the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us."
Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language