Audience Review

Here’s the thing: I’ve never seen anything that didn’t intrigue me at Mt. Tremper Arts. Kudos to AynsleyVandenbroucke and Mathew Pokoik for offering such a variety of work to the audiences and supporting the artists with such heart during these celebrations. This has been true since the first one I attended and the one I performed in with Vincent Thomas and was absolutely exemplified last night. Here’s my stream of consciousness response, followed by a translation into more follow-able, critical thought.

Lots of solos and duets on the program. Why are those lights flashing so much? The space is filling with water and baritone. Ocean, piano, opera, nascar racing. Why is it important that we know the chair is Le Corbusier? A very cool guy vibrates onto the stage. The paper walls sound great coming down. ::: She’s a pumpkin…no she’s looking for the pumpkin. Oh, she’s gonna be the pumpkin at the end. Wait, this is getting really interesting. She’s totally out there, silly, maniacal, awkward, whimsical. I want her to find her pumpkin and she does, and she is. ::: Inspired tiny gestures, control and release, percussive, secret longings, black costume, white props fly. How many people are in that body? Motifs from boxing, drunkenness, frustration. She so in control of her lack of control.:::Duet at the window. Rope and pulley. Slow and deliberate movement punctuated by bursts of contact or unison. What happened to the grass? Oh, there it is again. Window phrase again, roles reversed. Resolved. ::: Video hottentot, rhythmic sound of the bench she’s on. Music sets the them and content. Movement athletic and physical, accompanies music. Why not the other way around?

Magnetic Laboratorium

The evening was split between solo work and duets, some involving space-transforming sets and/or video, some relying solely on the presence of the performer. Though the interdisciplinarity of many of the works had some audience members with whom I spoke wondering “is this dance?” there was indeed a lot of absolutely striking movement within each of the five performer’s succinct sections of the evening. Whether some audience members understood the works as dance per se is mostly irrelevant, since the performances represented such a broad spectrum within dance practice and were, more than anything else, presented each to be taken on its own terms. It is always good practice to question and come to understand those terms.

Ariane Anthony’s awkward and whimsical physical presence, including her voice, transformed numerous times in her solo, Where is My Pumpkin? compelling me to take a journey with an orange-clad character in search of her essence, signified by – of all things - a lost pumpkin. Sounds silly on paper, and the piece had plenty of humor in it, but Ms. Anthony keeps her silly just barely this side of maniacal and the effect sort of warmed me and chilled me at the same time. She told and sang as much as danced her story, using mime and ‘sending up’ the ballet training in her background with overstated pirouettes and facial expressions. Only in the end, when the ‘pumpkin’ was found did things get a little serious, causing me to recalibrate my understanding of what I had seen up to that point and appreciate what total command Ariane Anthony had over her transformation, and ours.

In the case of Monica Bill Barnes’ Relinquish and Suddenly Summer Somewhere (excerpt) the theatricality of the work pushed the lushness and specificity of the dancing itself even further to the foreground. Ms. Barnes is character actor and dancer in both, though in a different way from Ms. Anthony. She closed the distance between stage and audience numerous times by taking pedestrian dips outside her finely structured choreography and sending casual, almost aggressive facial expressions flying through the ‘fourth wall’ in Suddenly Summer Somewhere. Tiny and inspired gestures in Relinquish read as small secrets and longings for control in contrast to the sudden flight of spare white props (some confetti, three white handkerchiefs) from within her costume. These gestures (vigorously scrubbing a single spot on the floor, repeatedly wiping her feet clean on her black costume) were juxtaposed with unexpected space-holds and quick, expansive directional changes that had the same movement quality as the handkerchiefs in mid-air. The excerpt from Suddenly Summer Somewhere was a portrait of a complex character whose movements pushed the boundaries of physical balance against Dean Martin’s inebriated vocals (his version of Cole Porter’s ‘I Love Paris [Vegas]’). There were so many facets to that character that I wondered if Ms. Barnes’ body actually contained several different people at times. She moved through motifs from boozing to boxing to being utterly lost without being truly literal or illustrative. I found the whole very moving and completely mesmerizing, if a little hard to pin down.

Other memorable moments of the evening were the opening sequence of Shani Nwando Ikerioha Collins’ Prelude: Eternal, with the creaking of the bench under her feet and her strong physical presence against the video backdrop, Makram Hamdan’s marathon of vibrating micro steps in Magnetic Laboratorium’s 9 Minute Program, and some tender and sudden partnering between Richert Shnorr and Enrico Wey in his Standard Gravity Part 1a.

Too bad we’ll have to wait until next summer for another festival, but I predict it’ll be worth the wait.

Clyde Forth’s work has crossed the boundaries of drawing, sculpture, video, dance and poetry for the last 18 years. Her performances and artwork have been shown across the US, and in Canada and the UK. She owns and operates a dance and interdisciplinary art studio, Circle House, in Saugerties, and teaches dance at SUNY Ulster. Ms. forth was recently honored with a choreography residency fellowship at Dance Omi in Ghent, NY and a residency at Earthdance in Cummington, MA through The Field. Under Ms. forth’s direction, Clyde Forth Visual Theatre is currently developing work for its sixth season of original performance work.