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

Silvering

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.

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

Last Solo - Wen Wei Wang | Wen Wei Dance (Vancouver)

Wen Wei Wang began dancing in China, where the expressive language of the hands, arms, and upper body shaped his artistic voice. As he grew older, he came to understand that his sexuality was different, a realization that deeply influenced his life and creative journey.

Now, returning to the stage as a senior artist, he reflects on memory, mortality, and the connection between body, mind, and the universe. Through this final solo work, he invites audiences to contemplate aging, transformation, vulnerability, and resilience.

The work is created in collaboration with visual and sound artist Gary James Joynes, who works at the intersection of analog and digital media. For this piece, he brings live vocalizations into the space alongside projections that translate sound into visual form.

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.

Barbara England | (Calgary)