...I am often baffled when looking at photographs. I feel like many artists are often trying to trick me (the viewer) into thinking that I am not looking at an hyper-altered and photoshopped image. Each photograph in this show debunked my feeling. I found that each work engaged me to think about how a picture is constructed and how we approach an image. I liked how I had to circle the show a few times and slid across the room to verify what I saw was in fact what I saw. In her essay, Whitaker writes, "There's a modesty to the works of the artists that I find attractive, as if they are simply sidestepping the race to find the next great artist out of the devastation, in favor of more honest pursuits. They asymptomatically approach a basic core, where hard meaning can reliably be found, like a rock smoothed by friction." The works were playful and diligent in engaging the audience with focused imagery which Whitaker describes as "acts not of escapism, but of affirmation." At a time like ours, we need as much affirmation as possible and I appreciated Hannah Whitaker's sincere direction of the show....
I’ve enjoyed the exhibit on two nights, and was fascinated by the way the different performances affected the way that I attended to the art on the walls. The first evening’s performance was exploratory, sometimes subtle, blurring the line between performance and “real life.” The attentive tone of the piece resounded more than any particular emotive quality. After the performance, the audience migrated to the walls, pulled to the art like magnets. People quietly took in the exhibit, just as we’d taken in the performance. The second time I saw The Noble Savage and the Little Tramp was at the closing night of the season. The dance performance was raw with emotion and afterwards few people looked at the images. I tried to look (because I wanted to be able to see the exhibit and say something about it!) but when I tried to go toward the walls, I felt disinterested, unable to engage it at all. I had to come back to it later....
...In the first piece The Materiality of Impermanence we could see Kimberly’s interest in drama, theatricality and writing as well as choreography as the atmosphere was mysterious and intriguing using dramatic lighting and spoken words which were part muffled but evocative of space and water, land, relationship and the passing of time....
...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....
How often do we have full permission to just look at a human body, unselfcounsciously? 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....
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....
D: …it was hilarious, but there was still something poignant and tragic about the lengths they would go to, or the inner turmoil that they were obviously having.
c: Oh, yeah, that reminds me I want to say something about their relationship with “the absent people”. In the last piece, it really felt like there was another set of characters they were playing with offstage. That was really convincing. At one point I even looked behind me to see if there was someone back there who Monica was reacting to. Did you feel that? There was this other imagined audience during the first piece, a Las Vegas sized audience out there behind us who they were also winking at and playing to. Then there were times when they were playing to us actually sitting there. A disconcerting amount of eye contact, which I like....
...Most remarkable about this company’s work is the use of facial expressions, especially to add a comic element. Dancers are so often associated with expressing movement through their body alone, and the face is often almost a blank slate. That is fine for much work but Barnes’ style truly benefits from this holistic element. The facial choreography is distinctive from what is going on down below, but is not distracting. Rather, it’s integral, and recalls a slapstick sensibility that showcases Barnes’ and Bass’ talent not just as trained dancers but also as actresses....
...The performance, 3 Dancers, 4 chairs, 26 words by the Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group was to me a sweet, contemplative exploration of two themes: grieving and semiotics. In the first moments of the piece, a sign informs us that this is a prologue. A woman places a series of written words on the stage. these words have an ominous message. Things are amiss; a man, woman, or child has died. The narrative device of a prologue gives the audience license to read a story into what follows, no matter how cyclical or atmospheric that story may be.....
...Words containers containing contain
What was that ? Who is this word
And serene was this life this one who asked who knew who went before.
Words can dance and dancers be words
Beginning...