....This piece is undoubtedly the most challenging artistic endeavor I have ever been asked to perform, and for that I am deeply grateful to choreographer and friend, Mark Jarecke. Being given a chance to revisit this piece was a true gift. The tremendous physical vigor and porous mind-space required to enter this piece were daunting at times. However, Mark revealed the necessity of me trusting myself and my body, having had a ten-year history of being inside his work and process.
I was being asked to be present in the moment. I was trying not to make a decision or compose in the moment. In other words, I was attempting to be less cerebral, because from Mark’s perspective, that state can dampen the immediacy and genuineness of the movement. Although completely choreographed, the challenge given to me was not to re-create past experiences of the piece but rather to surprise and create anew by being true to each moment of the movement quality itself....
...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....