Learn about Audience Reviews here, read others here.

photo by Mandy Ringger

Everything Up Until Now and Including

How often do we have full permission to just look at a human body, unselfconsciously? We usually look with purpose -- to see and assess what's going on with someone, how they feel, what they think. Everything Up Until Now and Including provided an opportunity to see the human body, the human form, how it moves, what it does, without story, without working to assess.That's what I enjoyed about this piece. It's also what some audience members afterwards found to be not-as-enjoyable as they would have liked, feeling that they missed having a story and therefore found it more challenging to follow the dance.

Everything Up Until Now and Including was unpretentious. I found myself breathing in unison with the dancer, the movement of her ribs, belly, shoulders, reminding me of how tender this body is, how flexible and vulnerable we humans are. The movements felt more like exploration than expression of emotion. A very curious, attentive exploration of how the body moves when the movement begins with a slight tilt of the head. A whole section of vibrant movement coming out of that subtle movement. Sometimes the dancer seemed to disappear, her wishes irrelevant to the movement of her body, as if her movements were following her body, gravity, and the flow of initiated energy.

Many times I found myself just looking at her feet. The way they pressed into the floor, the way her toes curled away from the floor, the way one foot rooted, the other swayed. I don't usually look at feet. What an amazing thing, the way we humans stand, walk, bend, sway, swirl, hurl ourselves about.

A few times, the performer paused, sat down, leaned against the wall and basically took a break. I thought, am I supposed to see this? Yes, I can see this. The lighting had changed, but the lights were still on...another blurring of the line between performance and our everyday life. Exploration in all ways.

Afterwards, the choreographer's three-year-old son thoroughly enjoyed MTA's dance floor, galloping and chasing and running and skipping about the room, punctuating his play with giggles and squeals, gathering his father and MTA co-director, Aynsley into the play. These are the moments that make me really appreciate MTA's space and setting! A quality performance, remarkable for it's naturalness, followed by...another unpretentious performance of spontaneous play and exploration! How often do you get to see choreographers playing? What I love about MTA is not just the performance, but the whole process of creation of art, and the appreciation of that creation in all it's many forms.

Amy Shoko Brown offers workshops and private sessions in Healing through Creativity. She also teaches qigong in Phoenicia and cohosts Be the Change: Voices of Action every Wednesday on 91.3 WVKR. She was recently nominated as a Democratic candidate for Shandaken Town Justice.