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....
Hilary Easton + Company’s performance of Noise + Speed last night left my head swirling. In a good way. During the course of the hour-long performance, set to music and text, I found myself drawn in again and again and again. Which brings me to my first observation: the challenge of staying totally present to a work of art like a dance performance. Much of my experience of art has been limited to queuing up behind a line of other spectators to stand for a few moments in front of a painting, photograph or sculpture in a crowded museum. Only in recent years have I learned to sit in front of piece for a half hour or more, letting it work on me. But watching a dance performance demands a sustained close attention to the action and a wider awareness that can take in the music, the energy inside the space, movements happening on the periphery, etc....
“…This was back in the 70’s. I was sitting with my dad and his friends in a cloud of blue pot smoke looking at cigarette ads for subliminal messages. That’s how I learned about photography—that there could be a lot of meaning packed into a photographic image, whether it’s real or not.” Thus began “SIGNS and the Language of Photography,” the final installment in Mt. Tremper Arts’s Thursday Night Lecture Series. The above quote is from Tim Davis, who along with Lisa Kereszi and Mathew Pokoik (who curated SIGNS) showed slides of their work and talked about how and why they photograph signs....
Audience Review
8:15pm: The dancers, percussionists, Matt and Aynsley, and a few others stand outside the studio, studying the sky. “Which way are the clouds moving?” Matt goes inside to check the weather. Radar shows rain over the reservoir, but nothing in Mt. Tremper. The decision is finally made: Full Circle will be performed for the first time outdoors, in the field above the studio. As the percussionists break down their gear and trot it from the studio to their cars to haul up the hill, the sky darkens and a few distant lightning flashes are visible over the mountain in the distance. “I’m getting kind of nervous,” says Matt. But there is no question. “We’re committed.”
9:00pm: Most of the guests have arrived and either begin the 8-minute walk up the hill, or climb into the car shuttling guests to the field. Each guest received a flashlight before heading up the hill, and many make use of the spray-bottles of OFF! on the ticket desk before heading up.