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photo by Mandy Ringger

There are some works of art that reach out and grab me by the lapels (Richard Serra’s Torqued Spirals come to mind). There are others that require me to know something about the artist, or the process, or the context in which it was created, to be able to appreciate it. Mark Jarecke’s Everything Up Until Now and Including falls into the latter category.

Mount Tremper Arts is a rare venue in that after the performance, I can walk up to Mark Jarecke and say, “So help me out here.” Jarecke was very generous with his time and energy, fielding my questions and hearing me out on my experience of the piece. I’ve seen many performances at MTA, and this one was by far the most challenging. Jarecke told me he wanted to explore what dance means “when you strip away all the cues:” costumes, sets, music, fluid dance phrases, a narrative. He said there was no hidden meaning, no special club you had to belong to to “get it.” But hearing him use words like “homolateral movement” and “distal initiation” in our conversation made me wonder. Jarecke is an intellectual, and his piece brought to mind obscure, post-modern academic writing in an embodied form.

In the end, I’m left with the movement itself, and my experience of it. The dancer Andrea Johnson performed alone, wearing loose grey pants and a loose, layered tank top. The soundtrack was her breath, labored through nearly 45 minutes of exertion, and the thumps and swishes of her body against the floor. A couple times she sat against the studio wall, catching her breath, and it was during these breaks that I felt like I was really with her—as she took a sip from her water bottle and readjusted her ponytail. Jarecke talked to me about being interested in “quality” in the movement, but during the actual performance, I imagined what communication could have occurred between dancer and choreographer to have produced the movement I was seeing. I want you to flail around on the floor. Awkwardly.

I felt by turns bemused, confounded, confused, irritated and bored. Toward the end, however, Andrea stood in front of us. Just stood there. And I wondered at how vulnerable dancers are as artists. A painter or photographer puts their work up and doesn’t even have to be there when people look at it. They can be dead while people look at it. For dancers, their body is the art, and when they perform they give themselves completely. It was at that one brief moment that I felt something like gratitude, or humility.

An artist who is brave—or something—enough to ask “what does it mean when all the cues are stripped away?” makes himself vulnerable, too. Because given the average person’s attention span, or commitment/intention/capacity to being present with something that is not “entertaining,” a piece like Jarecke’s is asking a lot of its audience. I spoke to a couple people after the performance, and one of them drew analogies like, [paraphrasing:] “if it was a film, it’d be documentary; if it were a painting, it would be abstract expressionism.” This was helpful, and interesting. There is something frustrating for me, however, about feeling like I need to huddle up and talk about it afterwards, or take a class on it, to appreciate it.

I ended my conversation with Jarecke marveling at how all of us had our own experience of the piece. He was saying that watching from the loft this time, he found himself moving a lot, not quite sure what was next. I wondered about Andrea’s experience actually performing the piece. I wondered what the little girl, sitting on the floor in front of me during the performance, thought about this lanky woman spinning and falling and twisting around on the floor. In the end, and as always, each of us is left with our own experience.

Shea Settimi lives in Mount Tremper.