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Culture Dance

Interior view

Rating: NNNNN

INTERIOR VIEW choreographed and performed by Peggy Baker, with Andrew Burashko. Presented by Peggy Baker Dance Projects at the Betty Oliphant Theatre (404 Jarvis). Runs to November 19, Thursday-Saturday at 8:30 pm, matinee Sunday 4 pm. $24-$30. Very limited seating. 504-7529. Rating: NNNNfor the first half of peggy Baker’s Interior View, there’s not a single wasted or unnecessary gesture. It’s pure dance, up close and personal, with no room for dishonesty.Sitting against the back of the performing stage, the audience looks out as Baker dances to Aleksandr Scriabin’s preludes, played by pianist/collaborator Andrew Burashko. As Baker extends her long, expressive arms, traverses the stage, crouches, collapses her limbs and sprawls onto the floor to the quickly changing music, it’s as if we’re witnessing something being created.

It’s an illusion, of course. The art has been carefully honed. But Baker’s art is so immediate, her energy so palpable, her concentration so exact, that like the title, Unfold, she suggests the unfolding of feelings and emotions on the spot.

The rest of the program consists of Some Of What Was Seen And Heard, mostly short pieces performed to dreamy, impressionistic music by John Cage. There are occasional rough patches, like having Burashko, a better pianist than speaker, read from written Cage. But it’s a treat to revisit Baker’s 1997 work A True Story, a seemingly autobiographical piece about becoming a stepmother to a teenage girl. Here, as Baker tells us about picking up and throwing away labels and titles, we see movement as an integral part of storytelling and life.

Baker doesn’t just believe this herself. She makes us believe it, too. Baker cooks

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