Well, it was a big, messy evening, and I loved almost every minute. Driving down from Margaretville, I was out of my mind with excitement and expectation. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t heard about Mt. Tremper Arts (you’re neglecting the possibilities of your audience up the road a piece), but from the moment I read the calendar of events I couldn’t wait to be there.
The setting is beautiful, and the evening was as meltingly beautiful as summer evenings can be in the Catskills. It was a pleasure to wander through the gardens and to watch the audience arrive and to note how diverse that audience was – it was exciting to note that fully half were young....
Who knew that Phoenicia was a hotbed of art, music and dance? On Main st. there was an art opening and a vibraphone concert. And down the road was a dance performance at a venue called Mt. Tremper Arts. The performance this July 17th was great. The first two dances very sensuous, thoughtful, energetic and modern. The dancers were superb, controlled and moving. The last piece called “Heavens, What Have I Done?”, began with a hilarious monologue by the dancer, Miguel Gutierrez, while he was putting on makeup and preparing the stage.
Untitled Project with Jenny Holzer but I’m not allowed to give it a name yet
On entering with the rest of the audience, we found the opening piece, by design, already in progress: a window, seemingly, on a dance class, with the ten men and women, apparently leaderless, in various forms of workout or gym clothes. The attire, from shorts to khakis, seemed utterly individuated, to the extent that I found myself questioning why one dancer had chosen such brief red gym shorts--i.e., the same sort of idle commentary one might indulge in as a participant in a real dance exercise class) The dancers were exuberant, moving sometimes in concert, sometimes individually or in pairs.
After some blase months in the northwestern Catskills, the discovery of Mount Tremper Arts (MTA) proved to be a delightfully refreshing oasis in the comparative cultural desert of the area – a better-than-Berkshirean arts-in-nature experience.
Their thankfully under-landscaped lawn/garden is crowned by unique horticultural gem: an organic vegetable garden substantial enough to feed on-site a hundred attendees hungry for both its eco-friendly produce and art....
...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....