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photo by Mandy Ringger

Audience Review for Mark Jarecke’s solo dance “Everything Up Until Now and Including” performed by Andrea Johnston on August 14th & 15th, 2009 at Mount Tremper Arts.  By Andrew Megginson

First, a little disclaimer: I have seen this work before in its original performances in 2006; and – the dancer/co-creator is my wife.

My impressions from watching the solo last weekend were that Mark and Andrea offer us a mosaic of thousands of tiny moments. Each moment has its own nuances, its own flavor. But it comes together somewhat like a large impressionist painting – all the moments create a larger picture. The dancer has her focus downwards or “inwards” for most of the piece, leaving us in the audience feeling like we’re on the outside, trying to learn what’s happening inside. The feeling is that we are watching a personal struggle, and so the fact that we are allowed to witness it gives one the sense that we are being privileged with a close eye into some very intimate wrestling. There is repetition of a task. But this is masked by changes in direction, speed, movement quality, by stutters and hiccups. Sometimes the punctuations are almost violent, the smacking of knees and ankles into the floor as the dancer carves her inexorable path through space. Less often her motions are slow and syrupy, as if a swan were unfolding her wings underwater. A few times she stops altogether, exhausted, and goes off to the side of the stage. There she sits, catching her breath and sweating, and re-ties her hair. She begins again a few minutes later, like Sisyphus coming back to his unending task.

Some audience members find the breaks to be the most interesting part. They feel it is the only time they can really see the dancer. To me, it seems like watching someone in their personal moments at their most vulnerable, like watching someone using the toilet, or on a walk with a leashed dog, watching him as he bears down to excrete. I turn away, not out of squeamishness or prudishness, but because I want to allow the dog (and the dancer) that private moment to be vulnerable without outside scrutiny. I take in the space, letting my eye play over the artworks hanging in the room. My eye settles on a small rectilinear prism of golden wire suspended between the rafters by heavy pieces of thread radiating from each corner of the form off to the edges of the room.

She comes back again and again, plowing, pushing, carving, slopping, painting, panting. When she is on stage, she is no longer my wife. She no longer has any responsibility to respond to me, worry about me, love me, be annoyed with me. She is in her own domain, moving as if in a dream-world, at battle with the tides around her and running through her. She may seem as if she is totally separated from us, from our world. But to me it is more like she represents us. I see in her constant struggle, her restlessness, an allegory for my life, for all life. It feels very familiar. But that sounds grandiose. It is simpler than that, as if you were watching a farmer working her little piece of land, watching the work of every day.

The solo seems to gather in intensity, slowly, like a snowball rolling down a hill, and then, a moment of soft slowness, a pause. She kneels before the audience, deliberately takes each of us in, one by one, eye to eye. And I was wrong before, because as she meets my eye she does see me, and does not flinch. I look away embarrassed by the vast shared knowledge in that glance. Soon she gets up again and begins her work once more. With a slow flourish, like a wave retreating, she ends it.