Silvering: Bodies of Experience | Featuring Peggy Baker, Davida Monk, Barbara England & Wen Wei Wang

Silvering: Bodies of Experience

Barbara England | For Paul and Graham

Davida Monk | Undertow

Wen Wei Wang | Last Solo

Peggy Baker | unmoored

Fluid Fest presents Silvering—a living archive of esteemed and storied figures within the Canadian dance community.

Celebrate the performances of outstanding artists who continue to move, question, experiment and take creative risks. These are not stories about slowing down—they are encounters with incredible artists whose practices have accumulated decades of experience while remaining restless, curious and gloriously becoming.

This year, Springboard is dedicating a significant part of Fluid Festival to exploring aging, artistry, embodiment, and the evolving relationship between the aging dancing body and creative practice. Through performances, workshops, community engagement, and conversations, Silvering brings together artists, older dancers, researchers, and audiences to consider how we value experience, longevity, and artistic expression across the lifespan.

Peggy Baker, Wen Wei Wang, Davida Monk and Barbara England demonstrate a profound understanding of the body as a site of memory, knowledge, transformation, and continued artistic possibility. Through their wealth of choreographic exploration, witness a dynamic conversation about aging and artistry.

• On the November 6th performance, please join us for a pre-show discussion with Brian Webb and Nicole Mion at 6:15pm. Following the show, we invite you to stay for an artist talkback with the performers.

Program Details

unmoored - Peggy Baker & Sarah Chase (Toronto)

unmoored is an autobiographical work of storytelling and dance that brings Peggy Baker's deeply personal, embodied life experience to the stage. It recounts events during the 20-year arc of Peggy’s marriage to the musician, composer, and disability rights activist, Ahmed Hassan. unmoored is centered on themes of disability, caregiving and death and is intended for a mature audience.Created in collaboration with B.C.-based choreographer Sarah Chase, the work merges Baker's extraordinary artistic legacy with Chase's innovative approach to solo creation, resulting in a poignant reflection on memory, identity, and the passage of time.

Born in Alberta, Peggy Baker is widely recognized as one of Canada's most influential contemporary dance artists. Her singular artistry is rooted in a rich foundation of both dance and theatre, beginning with studies in the Drama Department at the University of Alberta, followed by training at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, the Martha Graham School, and the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York. Throughout an acclaimed international career spanning more than five decades, Baker has become renowned for the depth, precision, and emotional intelligence of her performances.

In unmoored, Baker's lifetime of artistic inquiry is distilled into an intimate performance that celebrates the resilience of the aging body and the enduring power of dance to hold memory, presence, and transformation.

unmoored was awarded Outstanding Performance (female) 2018, Dora Mavor Moore Award

Lotus Shoes (An Excerpt from Last Solo)
- Wen Wei Wang | Wen Wei Dance (Vancouver)

Last Solo is a creative collaboration between Wen Wei Wang (Choreographer & Performer) and Gary James Joynes (Composer & Live Audio Visuals).

Foot binding was the Chinese custom of breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls to change their shape and size for over a thousand years. Feet altered by foot binding were known as lotus feet and the shoes made for them were known as lotus shoes. In late imperial China, bound feet were considered a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. However, foot binding was a painful practice that limited the mobility of women and resulted in lifelong disabilities.
The aesthetic distortion of foot binding is the ultimate manifestation of the instrumentalization and objectification of women. It uses secular interests (marriage) and morality (female morality) as bait, making women actively or passively accept this physical harm in pain.
I use the shoes to express my sexuality, my Chinese heritage and to express beauty and pain.

*This excerpt does not include projects or live vocals from Gary James Joynes.

Undertow - Davida Monk & Melissa Monteros | m-body (Calgary)

Davida Monk and Melissa Monteros have continued to weave in and out of each others creative orbits for decades. Beginning thirty years ago with Our Common Body, a shared evening of works, continuing as sometime performers, and outside eyes for each other’s creations, maintaining throughout a passionate dialogue about contemporary dance, today—still disciplined, relentless, fierce—they return to the studio together to create a new work.

The result is a deeply considered look at human potential in the late Anthropocene. Monk places herself in Monteros’s hands; Monteros places her work in Monk’s body—an exchange at once fresh, unpretentious and lean.

Duet for Paul and Graham - Barbara England | (Calgary)

Duet for Paul and Graham brings two dancers back to the stage, twenty years after their final bows.

This duet takes place against the backdrop of a once-vibrant artistic community that has dispersed. It considers the quiet but profound form of artistic isolation that senior dancers can experience when colleagues retire from dance or change careers. Older dancers are often repositioned as teachers, mentors, and institutional figures. They remain visible in the field while becoming less visible on stage.

This is the reality for Paul and Graham. In this piece, dancing together for the first time, they seek to build a new relationship with dance, with each other, and with the audience.

Here, virtuosity is measured by attention: the ability to adapt, trust, and make space for another body. Duet for Paul and Graham is a meeting between two dancers — an invitation to witness what becomes possible when experience, curiosity, and care take centre stage.