Lenox — J.S. Bach’s music affects everyone differently. Some weep, some chuckle, some feel awestruck, and some feel an irresistible urge to move. I recorded Bach’s fifth Goldberg variation at Glenn Gould’s tempo because it makes me tap my feet and because it evokes images of Tony Hawk doing dangerous things on a skateboard. And Peter Sparling responds to Bach’s music in the way most natural to a dancer: by moving his whole body. How he does it, and why, are the subjects of the Berkshire Bach Society’s (BBS’) next event in their Portals series, to be held on November 8 and 9, in Pittsfield and Lenox.
The main event on the 8th and 9th is a screening of Mr. Sparling’s film “Chaconne,” featuring his dance interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004. The film aims to embody the emotional and technical depth of Bach’s composition and explore the intimate relationship between music and movement.
BBS Artistic Director Eugene Drucker will play the first four movements of the Partita on both nights.
Peter Sparling is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and The Juilliard School. He was a member of the José Limón Dance Company and was principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company for 25 years. He is now professor emeritus of dance at Michigan State University. I spoke with Peter last week by telephone to get the inside scoop on this program. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
EDGE
What was the impetus to make “Chaconne”? What made you do it?
SPARLING
I was originally trained as a violinist before I started dancing, and so I have an affinity and a close kind of physical memory of playing the violin. Listening to the Chaconne for the past 50-odd years has kind of ingrained in me this sense that the Chaconne is the Mount Everest for a solo violinist. And I was really fortunate to have studied under a very well known modern dance pioneer, Jose Limon.
Jose had created a solo version, a dance version of the Bach Chaconne, in 1942. And I was fortunate to learn the work in the late 1980s and perform it. So that was my first experience actually moving to that piece of music.
It was really during the pandemic, maybe in 2021, that I realized my backyard painting studio was just large enough for me to set up a camera and to videotape myself doing these miniatures. I had videotaped many of these little video miniatures as source material for my paintings. I use my moving figure as a model for a lot of my abstract or figurative works.
I thought: Okay. I’m 71. I am feeling my body lose its flexibility. I am experiencing aging. It’s now or never.
I needed to get in front of the camera, and I needed to dance to that piece of music that I loved so much, so dearly. Also, what was interesting was that when Jose Limon choreographed his version in 1942, he left out the B section, the major key section in the middle of the of the work. He choreographed only the first and third sections in the minor key. And I always wondered why he did that. Granted, it’s a relatively long work to sustain as a solo dancer.
But I thought I would really like to attempt to do the entire thing and try to do it justice. So, it was a combination of things: loving the music, feeling that it was now or never, being in the midst of a pandemic, being kind of boxed in as a hermit in my backyard studio, and saying what the eff.
So I set up the camera, and I just went at it. It was a rather primitive setup. I didn’t have multiple cameras. It was just one. I would shoot myself either against green screen, so that I could use chroma key, or I would videotape myself against a black backdrop, so that it was a just a very stark, simple outline of a mature, aging man. And I wanted to reveal the sinew. I wanted to to reveal the physicality and the anatomical subtleties of gesture, and of muscle, because that’s how I related to the music. I have always related to that piece — being so visceral, so physical. And I wanted to somehow capture that, both visually and viscerally, on video. (There’s a lot of v’s there.)
And I would kind of subdivide the piece in its variations, and I would do, like, variation one, do the theme. And then I’d decide, well, I want to do a close-up for variation one, and then I want do something else. I would kind of subdivide and create a sequence in my mind as I shot the video such that once I could lay it down in Final Cut Pro, I could compose the piece, having already, in a sense, composed it in the filming.
And so it that’s how it came together.
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See a screening of Peter Sparling’s film “Chaconne,” hear BBS Artistic Director Eugene Drucker play the first four movements of BWV 1004, and participate in a discussion and audience Q&A with Sparling and Drucker on November 8, 7 p.m., at Koussevitsky Arts Center, Berkshire Community College, 1350 West Street, Pittsfield, or on November 9, 7 p.m., at Lenox Town Hall, 6 Walker Street, Lenox. More information and tickets are available here.
More information about Peter Sparling is available on his websites (painting/video and dance) and his Facebook page.
