Dear Aynsley and Mathew:

I want to congratulate you on the success of your festival, Mt. Tremper Arts.

By creating anything new, we embody the spirit of Walt Whitman, who believed in nothing more than he believed in the possibility inherent in the American experience to set precedent; to do what has not been done before; to decide for ourselves that, yes, this is how we want things to be, even if it means breaking from tradition and/or propriety.

Although, with new things come risks. I’m sure you both know, as artists, that it is impossible to satisfy the taste of every person who comes into contact with artwork. Artists are always aware of this conundrum, and each finds her/his own relationship between their work and the public. We must agree, though, that, in terms of art, it is always better to err on the side of risk. Risk is how we grow, discover, and learn.

That is why I would like to commend you for the risk you both took to program–without interference–the dance work of Elke Rindfleisch, whose two dances I found compelling, bold, enigmatic, incisive, and thoroughly brave.

Eight Years, a duet for Ms. Rindfleisch and one of her company dancers, Sarah Weber Gallo, was captivating. The movement, careful and strange–charged with emotion–was intensified by a focused eye contact between the two dancers. The work unfolded as the the two, starting in mirror, began to sense their independence and make steps–at first tentative, then emphatic–to establish their individual identities. At last, the two are walking steadily toward the back wall, heading in the same direction but, as their disparate movements suggest, forever different. And as the lights went out, Ms. Rindfleisch whipping her shoulders back behind her with each step, my breath was literally taken away.

Elke Rindfleisch "Not Without You" at Mount Tremper Arts

The solo, Not Without You, (photo above) is a more difficult kind of work; both to perform and to view.

It is private and deeply internal on the one hand, yet explicit and confrontational on the other. With this work, Ms. Rindfleisch seems to be exploring the refractive experiences of the body in its private and public realities, as well as in their real and mediated presentations.

The opening image of Ms. Rindfleisch is entrancing. Seated against a wall, she perfunctorily–almost angrily–snaps photographs of various parts of her body which appear to be projected above her in large images. Already we get a split representation: The real body before us (yet far away), and the images of the body (just as far away yet more detailed than the real). Ms. Rindfleisch is presenting us with a stereoscopy that is furnished by technology.

This opening eventually develops into movement passages that amble from cautious to coy; from falsely libidinous to stark and puzzling. A change of dress–from warm-up clothes to a slinky dress and bright blue wig–signals a new character; a female alter-ego, at once sexier, yet somehow mocking. The movement is a blend of Ms. Rindfleisch’s abstract, extreme physical positioning and more conventionally theatrical staging.

But it is Ms. Rindfleisch’s decision to perform large portions of the work in the nude that I feel compelled to address, and to defend.

Nudity in performance is obviously a risky maneuver, likely to draw the easiest, most thoughtless criticism. But this is, naturally, Ms. Rindfleisch’s exact point. In a work that seems to dwell on the appraisal of the body, Ms. Rindfleisch finds herself in a crisis between the body she has (i.e., the body she has used for decades to attract audiences) and the body she is expected to have (i.e., the manner in which she is expected to use her body).

On one hand, as a dancer, she must flaunt her body in certain ways to make her art, yet, at the same time, there are expectations that she and audiences have about just how her body should and should not look.

Nakedness becomes an issue primarily in the way a dancer is simultaneously expected (generally) to be attractive, yet also demure. Watching dance is supremely a voyeuristic activity, one that can allow us privy, nay, prerogative to lay heavy eyes on the bodies of those before us; deities; dancing gods and goddesses; paragons of physical beauty. Yet, if a dance becomes too sexual, too obviously dirty, then it delves quickly into the exact opposite: scandalous; reprehensible; pornographic.

It is a fine line, and one that Ms. Rindfleisch thoroughly exploits in this work, particularly when she turns the camera on the audience. Sliding by on a piece of fabric, entirely naked, she aims the lense of the camera at us, watching her, destroying the voyuerist audience’s illusion of privacy, which is essential to a true voyeur’s experience: The voyeur is never meant to be observed in return, which is what creates the perversity. But here, suddenly, the audience is being scrutinized with the same attention as the performer. And minutes later, there we are, copied and exploded in projections against the wall. We experience our own stereoscopy. One woman is smiling, eyes wide and engaged. Another looks stunned. Then a young boy ducks, shields his eyes with his arm from Ms. Rindfleisch’s naked body.

In a way it is unfair. We didn’t come here to be observed, right? Wrong.

In the first place, attending performance has a long tradition of being a primarily social occasion, the most conspicuous seats being reserved for the highest social order.

But then also, as any performer will tell you, and maybe more to Ms. Rindfleisch’s point: The performer can always see the audience; even in the largest theater; even in dim lighting. Voyeuristic privacy is an illusion of which the audience convinces itself in order to wrap their reactions in a veil of privacy.

So when our private moment is suddenly captured, taken from us, and displayed for all, it is surely an act of agression taken by the performer, and one that she must be taking for a reason.

And that is what we should be concerned with: Why would the performer make this choice? What is she aiming at by destroying the privacy of my voyeuristic experience, and why would she do it at the very moment when I am cuaght in my own crisis of wanting to see her naked body yet also wanting to behave appropriately within the context of a public and social atmosphere? (It is important to note that there was nothing sexy about the way this nudity was presented. In fact, the more suggestive dance passages occurred when Ms. Rindfleisch was fully clothed, which, ironically, the young boy allowed himself to watch.)

But in this aggression, Ms. Rindfleisch seems also to be just as angry with herself and her own expectations of her body; it must be inviting; it must stay healthy and strong; it must last. These are expectations that can trap as easily as they can drive one to achievement.

An added loss is that, as time goes by, Ms. Rindfleisch–and we–are losing the body at the center of this conflict, as it ages and is no longer able to carry out physical feats that arrest our attention and satisfy our desires.

Not everyone responds well to this kind of message, if I can call it a message. And not everyone will be able to handle nudity with a mature attitude. And by “mature attitude”, I do not mean that everyone will want to see it. One woman walked out as soon as Ms. Rindfleisch had removed her clothing. I found this to be mature in the sense that she knew, for herself, that nudity was not her thing. The other 99% of the audience remained, including the young boy who shielded his eyes.

And during the all too brief Q&A (thankfully you like to keep things short, but I think in this instance, a longer look at such complicated work would have helped the audience come to terms with their reactions communally) one of the boy’s guardians asked a question for him, which was simply, “Why did you get naked?”

He obviously wanted to know what we all wanted to know. And, as mature adults, if a child asks a question, we must give him an honest answer.

Ms. Rindfleisch said simply, “Because it’s part of who you are.” And that was that.

To be clear, I’m not attempting to wrap all of this up in a pretty package. But I do feel that to sustain a festival that fosters artistic freedom, and genuinely creative exploration, will require an emphatic community response for all the risks you and your artists take.

Some risks will glean huge rewards. Others will stop at dead-ends. But that is what keeps us reaching for knowledge through art. And in art, more than anything else, the reaching is what is important. The reaching is the art. To halt this process, or to prescribe it, or to interfere is deadly to art itself.

So I encourage you to keep the boundaries open. Hold tight to your vision. And continue to allow us to learn about oursleves through the work you produce.

The young boy may have shielded his eyes, but he also had the courage to question. And if that isn’t the highest compliment to Ms. Rindfleisch and to your festival, I cannot think of what is.

With deep thanks,
Ryan Tracy
(aka, The Counter Critic)