"THE photographer Mathew Pokoik swears he didn’t choose this charming Catskills town as the home for an interdisciplinary festival because of its almost total lack of cellphone reception. 'Although it also makes for a perfect residency experience,' he added in an e-mail message about the summer-long event he founded with the choreographer Aynsley Vandenbroucke, his wife...."
"Perched on a hillside above the Esopus Creek in Mount Tremper, there is a center for contemporary performance and visual art, dedicated to providing a rich and challenging environment where artists and audiences can stretch the limits of their understanding. The founders of Mount Tremper Arts (MTA), Mathew Pokoik and Aynsley Vandenbroucke, are young, energetic and daring...."
"Vandenbroucke and Pokoik, the founders and directors of Mount Tremper Arts, are themselves a “hybrid couple”: she's a choreographer, he's a photographer. At 33 and 35 respectively, they may be the youngest impresarios in the Hudson Valley—and among the most impressive...."
"Now in its third year, this homespun but sophisticated Catskills festival just keeps getting better...."
...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....
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....