BLOODLINES ROOM

Stephen Petronio and Anna Halprin, 2015. Photo by Caff Adeus.

March 4, 2016

We’re back home at The Joyce with our second season of Bloodlines, a project to honor the masters of my past while forging into our collective future. This season it is my deepest pleasure to present Trisha Brown’s succinct masterpiece, Glacial Decoy (1979). One of the peak moments in her long collaboration with artistic luminary Robert Rauschenberg, I see this as a reunion of two of the great minds of our time. As a young dancer in Trisha’s company, this work was brand new, so I was faced with a life-changing experience right out of the gate.

I came to love both these artists as family over the years, but Glacial Decoy left an indelible mark on my young dance-maker’s mind. Glacial Decoy presents the actions of a specific mind, a strong articulate woman—not representations of femaleness—moving through states from ordinary to sublime. There is a wholeness, a maddeningly slippery and elusive quality that is just out of grasp—the way the gestures overlap or feather into each other, split-second shifts from hot to cold to immeasurable, literal to abstract, to human action, then sneakily on to an expansive architectural form. And yet it’s decidedly female, her body and her mind that’s steering this emotional and architectural ship. She forms such a unique and mysterious portrait, then multiplies it, reproducing its oddness exactly across the space, magnifying and rendering a colder and more surgical critique of its own beauty. I have always seen this as a great feminist work of the minimalist period in New York. In my eyes, it celebrates the intelligence of a gender-driven story like no other.

I chose to pair it with MiddleSexGorge (1990) because this work was at the epicenter of my thinking about gender control and power at the onset of a most difficult time in our collective history—the onset of the AIDS epidemic. The anger forged into my language is utilized as a call to action. This response was inspired by my participation in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the late 1980s. It was a practice of civil disobedience to force acknowledgement of a devastating reality in New York, particularly in a disenfranchised same-sex community. MiddleSexGorge is a very different treatise on gender, deeply informed by my generation’s shift.

Finally, with Big Daddy (Deluxe), the familial connection is at a blood level. I wanted to create a work that spoke of my father, Thomas Petronio, who passed away a few years ago while I was in the midst of writing a memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict. Originally commissioned by the American Dance Festival as a solo, now expanded here, my writings about my father form the basis of its text, and the result is Big Daddy (Deluxe). Is this a dance, reading, or lecture demonstration? I’m teasing these boundaries, not fixed on its categorical label. I do know that while investigating language and motion, I’ve found a wonderful way to meditate on my father and my connection to him.

— Stephen Petronio

April 7 - 12, 2016

This season marks the first incarnation of Bloodlines, a new project of Stephen Petronio Company to honor and curate a lineage of American postmodern dance masters who have inspired so many through their work. These artists have also had a profound impact on my own artistic path. Over the next five years, the Company plans to bring works by Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and others into our repertory. These artists are distinguished for creating original languages that embody the highest level of artistic excellence displayed through extreme physical and conceptual rigor.

I find myself in a unique position as a living and working artist with a company of over 30 years, born from the inquiry of this generational movement, as well as being a participant in it through my early dancing with Trisha Brown. This moment is one of expansion and inclusion for Stephen Petronio Company. We bring these works to you with a possibility of renewed life, while there is still access to dancers and collaborators that were personally connected to and deeply invested in these unique artists.

We are launching Bloodlines with Merce Cunningham’s iconic RainForest (1968). I chose to begin with Merce, not because I consider him a postmodernist, but because I believe it all began with his quiet, revolutionary contribution to contemporary movement thought. Through his succinct and uncompromising art making, stripped down to the purest of forms, a generation was set loose and changed irrevocably.

How incredible it is to have the openhearted support of the Merce Cunningham Trust in bringing RainForest to you tonight and the honor of being the first American modern company in the U.S. to do so. I chose RainForest for its wild vision and iconic collaboration between Cunningham, Warhol, and Tudor at such a critical time in the late 60’s. Watching multiple generations of former Cunningham dancers so generously work with my own crew was an emotional process, a meticulous dialogue between masters of my own language and the magicians that have inhabited RainForest throughout its glorious history. This dialogue between languages has resonated in me profoundly.

Inherent in Bloodlines is the desire to continue and deepen my own art-making in reflection of my predecessors. What a teacher Merce continues to be. My new two-part work Locomotor/Non Locomotor is a meditation on the contrast between hurling energy through space and transiting energy that’s contained within the body. The rudimentary act of moving forward and backward through space, on journeys that take us into new creation as well as back to moments that stand out as physical peaks in my Company’s collective memory lead into Non Locomotor’sfocus on pathways torquing deep within the confines of the body.

The team of Michael Volpe, aka Clams Casino (music), Ken Tabachnick (light), and Narciso Rodriguez (costumes) has been a particular joy, as much due to their giant contributions to this work as to the effortless grace that each of these creative men possess. And how better to complete the cycle of 30 years than with music made by one of my own family members, my cousin Michael, who has been watching my work his whole life? Bloodlines indeed.

— Stephen Petronio

RAINFOREST 

(1968) Choreography: Merce Cunningham Music: David Tudor Decor: Andy Warhol Lighting: Aaron Copp Staged by: Andrea Weber, with Meg Harper and Rashaun Mitchell RainForest was first performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on March 9, 1968 in Buffalo, NY.

Photography by Sarah Silver.

Choreographer: Stephen Petronio

Dancer: Emily Stone

Stephen Petronio + Trisha Brown in Opal Loop (1980s), in the South of France

The first male in Trisha’s company, I remain for seven years (1979-86). A sweating, snorting bull in the china shop alongside one of the most intelligent and silky bodies on the planet, I am duly challenged. Fortunately, Trisha has a kind of alchemic effect on me from the beginning. (I’m not alone in this respect.) She continually asks me to think and dance beyond my grasp. More often than not, and to my surprise, I would myself doing it.

Trisha’s technique is more on your feet than the Contact work that led me to her, but it has that same alert openness, the same malleable continuum. Fluid. It’s more willful but something like bodysurfing in gentle, rolling heaves or riding on swift, soft jets of air. Surprising. Unpredictable. Muscle tone is relaxed, alert to signal deeply folding joints through fluid calligraphic journeys.

The company in those days is filled with heady ambitious individuals and Trisha reigns over it masterfully. I come from working-class Italian roots but she works harder than anyone I had ever seen did. When she is after something in the studio, she is relentless, patient and works with a curious calm. She creates an environment of trust, humor, and ownership. 

Stephen Petronio Company performing Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy (1979) at The Joyce Theater, March 2016. Photos by Robert Altman.

Dancers: Emily Stone and Cori Kresge

Dancer: Jaqi Medlock

Dancers: Emily Stone and Cori Kresge

GLACIAL DECOY

(1979) Choreography: Trisha Brown Set, Costumes, Visual Direction: Robert Rauschenberg Lighting: Beverly Emmons Staged by: Diane Madden and Lisa Kraus Performed by: Davalois Fearon, Cori Kresge, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, and Emily Stone.

Photography by Sarah Silver.