The Man Next Door Dances: The Art of Peter Bingham

By Kaija Pepper
Vancouver-based Peter Bingham has been a driving force in Canada’s contact improvisation scene for 30 years. Influenced by his early training with dancer/choreographer Linda Rubin, he later studied with American proponents of contact, Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith. In 1977, he co-founded Fulcrum with Andrew Harwood and Helen Clarke and the group presented contact-based dance performances and workshops in Vancouver and across Canada to enthusiastic response. In 1982, Bingham joined six other independent artists to create the collective EDAM, and has been sole artistic director since 1989.

Meticulously researched by the author, Kaija Pepper, Bingham’s contact improvisation and choreographic works are brought to life once again on the printed page with detailed and thoughtful representation. Fully illustrated, using photos from the early years to the present, we see inside the mind of a quiet, respectful but determined artist who has been able to keep on dancing through three turbulent decades of challenge and change.

About the Author
Kaija Pepper, dance writer, teacher and journalist, is the author of The Dance Teacher: A Biography of Kay Armstrong (2001), Theatrical Dance in Vancouver: 1880’s-1920’s (2000) and The Man Next Door Dances: The Art of Peter Bingham (2007 – finalist for the Vancouver Book Award). Her essays have been included in The Responsive Body: A Language of Contemporary Dance (Banff Centre Press, 2002) and in Right to Dance/Dancing for Rights (Banff Centre Press, 2004). Kaija is a dance critic for the Globe & Mail and her quarterly “View from Vancouver” has run in Dance International for over a decade; she also contributes to many other North American dance magazines and journals. Kaija leads writing workshops and lectures on dance history and critical thinking.