Stephen Petronio Company: Bloodlines Room

DANCER THOUGHTS: Restaging Group Primary Accumulation by Trisha Brown by Larissa Asebedo

“Un-ready” Shelley would say in her soothing voice as we were starting a practice run. We were lying supine, legs out long and arms straight by our sides with palms down, the beginning and ending position of Trisha Brown’s Group Primary Accumulation. Looking up at the ceiling the long narrow fluorescent lights of the studio beamed brightly as I got “un-prepared.” Aligning my body and legs on the floor, I arranged myself into a neutral position, using my muscles and then un-squeezing them while keeping my body in the form. Next I spilled my shoulder girdle off and away from my rib cage, towards my head, and a big breath rose and fell. “See something,” Shelley added. The other dancers came into view in my periphery lying and breathing along with me. Someone cued with an “and” and so we started.

We began learning GPA with Shelley Senter by watching her demonstrate the 30 movements that comprised the big accumulated sequence. We then began learning those very moves while tapping into the quality of the work which seeks to ride on the lines of energy through the body and out into space. Eventually we began learning the sequence in accumulation, starting back at movement number one each time a move was added on. As we continued, Shelley offered an idea that resonated with us that had to do with butterflies. “Put your hand in a fist,” she instructed, “now, put a butterfly in there,” she added, demonstrating how the same position and shape could carry a different energetic quality. We looked at how moving the leg in isolation, for instance in move number nine, feels different in the neck with your awareness of butterflies there. We also practiced connecting to vision in a full and wide way while moving through the choreography. Even as we were learning and practicing Shelley encouraged us to not to let our focus collapse internally. In this way, the choreography is kept alive as the supine material can seem zombie-like without this connection through the eyes.

Once we had accumulated a handful of moves we began taking turns doing the accumulation in groups. I kept Shelley’s teachings in mind, trying to connect to the form, space, and movement with ease while remembering my dance partners. I kept my awareness, particularly my vision, wide. A peculiar experience came over me as we danced together. The edges between myself, my fellow dancers, and the space in between began to blur. We were moving synchronously and felt as if we were one big, multi-body. It wasn’t scary or unsettling, it was very comforting and pleasant. I recognized the experience from my time spent in meditation, working to cultivate that very sensation. A blurring and melding of myself into my surroundings. I am grateful to have had one taste of this and, while seeking to find more of it, I try not to cling too much to the phenomenon. In our practicing, the accumulation would often get messy and difficult as we tried to keep track of the choreography, the spacing, the timing, and each other. Kindness and forgiveness towards the self came up in response to this. Shelley encouraged us to refrain from reacting with a muttered “shit” or twisted face. “Start practicing now” she wisely directed. Staying calm and open to disruptions and choosing how best to move forward whether by holding, restarting, catching up, etc. became another layer to the practice. Staying with this only made it that much sweeter when and if a few moments of oneness would arise again.

Rehearsals for GPA were a welcome addition to the rehearsal day as they were mainly spent on the floor and in a horizontal relationship to it. Other than my sacrum bearing the brunt of the workload it was a gentle way to ease back into a two week rehearsal period. We worked distally with Shelley, initiating movement of the limbs from the bony landmarks farthest away from the body’s center. This was reminiscent of Stephen’s work which is reminiscent of Trisha Brown’s. In a way it felt like coming full circle to this movement concept. The aesthetics and energy between Stephen and Trisha’s work do have their differences though. Few of the GPA movements are with pointed toes but rather opt for a relaxed elongated foot dubbed the “barbie foot.” Move number 14 called for one of the few pointed feet that, after performing for Shelley a few times, I was told to refrain from due to my “overability” to point, according to Shelley. Needless to say, the lines are executed differently between GPA and Stephen’s work as I haven’t yet heard Stephen discourage a fully pointed foot when it’s called for. At the end of the day, I found it engaging to jump into a novel yet familiar dance language and can see how it will enrich my understanding of Stephen’s work moving forward.

I am honored and excited to be a part of the lineage of GPA and to be in the first mixed gender cast of the piece. I celebrate the idea of opening up the casting to all bodies. The piece clearly honors the subtleties of the female body and the feminine and that, while coming from a physical place, I don’t see bound to the performer’s sex or gender. I believe it’s possible to evoke these qualities and ideas in any body just as it is possible for the feminine and masculine to be in any body. I acknowledge the biological differences between cis-gendered male and female bodies and think that a matter of casting could consider this in terms of compatibility of the group.

Overall, the process has been very rich for me so far and whether or not a live performance of GPA is on the horizon I have something to take away from the generosity of the work in and of itself.

- Larissa Asebedo

TREAD  by Bonnie Brooks 

part of a series of essays on the Bloodlines Project 

Merce Cunningham’s titles usually came pretty late in his choreographic process—or at least that’s most often when he would reveal what he was calling a new dance. His titles frequently offer multiple readings (CRWDSPCR, or XOVER), sometimes refer to nature (Pond Way, RainForest, Summerspace, Beach Birds), and may appear to be literal (How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run; Duets, Nearly Ninety). The titles were invitations, clues, and sometimes nods to information or backstory to which his audiences did not always have immediate access (Second Hand).

In this revival by Stephen Petronio Company of Cunningham’s 1970 work Tread, we have one of Merce’s more playful and mischievous choreographic projects. “Tread” is both a noun (a surface marking, the sound or manner of someone walking, the part of a tire that meets the road) and a verb (to walk in a specified way, such as “tread with care,” or keeping oneself upright but not traveling in water). The many possible readings of “tread” invoke a wink at the audience and the perpetual Cunningham invitation to his viewer to figure out or determine for themselves out just what might be going on here.

This is the third of Stephen Petronio Company’s Cunningham revivals, anchoring the company’s now-five-year old Bloodlines project. An initiative that honors the lineage of American postmodern dance masters, Petronio began his curation of Bloodlines in 2014 with Merce Cunningham’s iconic RainForest, originally performed on Cunningham’s own company in 1968. Since then, additional works by seminal dance postmodernists have been added to the Petronio repertory, including Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, an excerpt from Steve Paxton’s Goldberg Variations, Rudy Perez’s Coverage, Anna Halprin’s The Courtesan and the Crone, and Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A with Flags. More is coming. The project is Stephen Petronio’s grand experiment to create new material and clearly frame the legacy of his own distinguished body of work. In the process, he expands the range, capacity, and scope of his repertory by calling on his dancers to learn and perform works from dance’s experimental past.

With Tread, Stephen Petronio Company acquired a work that Cunningham Trust restager—and former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member—Jennifer Goggans says is a great match for Petronio’s dancers. “There’s a looseness and drive in the movement, a looseness in the torso and arms, that matches well with what the Petronio dancers do. They have the necessary technique but also know how to let it go.” The two previous works secured for Bloodlines, RainForest and Signals, are spare and primarily deploy solos, duets and trios.  Tread, Goggans notes, “is very much a group dance…playful, showing Merce’s sense of humor, loaded with complex tempos, offering a lot of release as the movement has such a free quality.” She added that in researching the work in preparation for the revival, “We found a film documentation of it, and it’s one of the few films of Merce’s work where almost all of the dancers were smiling the entire time, including Merce.”

Revival of any dance is always a complex process that depends on a host of resources ranging from choreographers’ (if available) and dancers’ (if available) memories to film/video/photo documentation if available, formal notation if it was done (Cunningham’s works were not notated in the traditional manner), references to notes of any kind, and any other resources that might help strengthen and clarify the action and content of a given work. When the decision was made to disband the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—to take place after Cunningham’s death (in 2009) and after an international, two-year tour to say thank you and goodbye (2010-2011)—work began to secure Cunningham’s legacy through his Trust. That work included the creation of “dance capsules” documenting all known assets of as many of his completed repertory works as possible. There are presently 86 digital dance capsules held by the Merce Cunningham Trust. The capsules are an ongoing resource for certified Cunningham restagers as well as scholars, writers, and historians whose initiatives sustain the Cunningham legacy and keep the work available to audiences around the globe.

Goggans spent a great deal of time combing through the Tread assets to broaden her knowledge of the dance before entering the studio with the Petronio dancers. “Sandra Neel, another former Cunningham Company dancer, who performed in Tread when it premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music in January, 1970, had done a workshop on Tread in 2008. One result of that workshop was a duet from Tread being added to the material that the company used in Events.” (Cunningham showed his work in two ways: repertory concerts of completed works, and Events that assembled excerpts from various dances into a new, timed configuration of material for performance, often in unusual or non-traditional spaces that were not suitable to repertory presentations).  

“Staring at a black and white, fuzzy video requires patience and a certain eye,” Goggans says.  “We also looked at contact sheets of photos taken by Jim Klosty. Those contact sheets had been a resource Sandra used in preparing for her workshop. We kept finding new bits of information. In combing through David Vaughan’s book, Merce Cunningham: 50 Years, I discovered a Tread photo of one of the poses in the work. Mel Wong was under everyone and crawls under the group and pokes out from under them. I never would have known that without the photo.”  

Bringing the work to the studio with Stephen Petronio’s dancers in autumn, 2018 was an opportunity for Goggans to engage with people who in many cases had taken her Cunningham classes at City Center and in some cases had participated in workshop settings on other Cunningham dances. “It made the job easier,” she said. “We weren’t starting from scratch in terms of Merce’s work. It was a pleasure, working with them. They’ve held onto the material, they’ve let it settle in their bodies, they know the piece inside and out. If there’s a problem, they know how to keep going.”

In watching Tread, with its complex entries and exits, changes in tempo, group poses and sly duets, physical entanglements and disentanglements, and sense of frolicking play, one can see the need to for the dancers to know the piece inside and out. The work is pragmatically structured (the dancers begin and end the dance casually seated on the floor, much action ensues in between) and has a working warehouse ambience, in part thanks to Christian Wolff’s score, and in part to the Bruce Nauman décor featuring ten industrial fans set across the front of the stage, all running, every other fan blowing the air from a stationary or oscillating setting.  The juxtaposition of startling and unpredictable sounds with the playful nature of the choreography is vintage Cunningham—make of it what you will, disparate things collide all the time in life, and we adjust ourselves to collisions of content and experience as needed. In this dance, Merce seems to be saying, “we’re all in this together, let’s have some fun.”

Stephen Petronio’s own connection to Tread, which came right around the time he was starting to dance, was an iconic photo of the dancers with Nauman’s fans. “As a young guy, I made certain associations with art, and that photo was fundamental to my understanding of that time in history, or at least my projection of it. When the Trust suggested Tread for our next Cunningham work, the Nauman décor and the word ‘playful’ were golden keys for me.” He added that by focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s in choosing the works to restage, “we could focus on a time in history when game and social structures were being looked at in a new way as material for dance. Merce used chance in his search for choreographic structures and movement. Others deployed other sources. One of the things that resonates in Tread is the complexity of the group communal activity. It’s one of the reasons this work is so perfect for my company. There’s always a group architecture that I’m interested in. In watching the piece grow, I’ve seen the dancers dial into that sensibility, using their communal radar and having to hone it into the Cunningham language. It’s a wonderful challenge. Tread is incredibly honed and spare, yet the delivery of the information is throughout the space. Perfect efficiency. Merce made the stage look sophisticated and casual at the same time. We’re so thrilled to learn it, invite the audience into it, and show viewers a side of Merce that they haven’t, in recent memory, seen.”  

One of the differences between the Cunningham revivals and most of the other works incorporated into Bloodlines, Petronio noted, is that Merce is not here. “To get at the elusive nature of the artist’s mind and intention, and how that gets utilized, is a daunting task. We’re learning there is no right answer or set way to do things when it comes to restaging. What continues in this project is a spirit of interest in trying various ways of getting into those minds and intentions. Every artist we have worked with wants something different. We have to be adaptable. And we’re learning so much from the process and the works.”    

Bringing this revival of Tread to audiences in New York City and beyond is the latest gift of the Bloodlines project—and from Stephen Petronio and the Merce Cunningham Trust—to dance aficionados. Many dance watchers today have never seen this delightful piece from Cunningham’s vast body of work. To see it now is both to encounter the legacy of Merce’s genius and also to be drawn into the fleeting pleasure of watching dancers skitter across a stage, engage in complicated ways with one another, pile up, stop and pose, disassemble, and resume activity. As ever, and absent any revealed narrative, Cunningham created ways for us to see our own lives flashing before us on the stage. In this case, with a grin.  

Connecting my present to the foundations of my past...

Prior to performing at Montpellier Danse Festival, Stephen participated in an interview with Wilson Le Personnic, digging into his thoughts about Bloodlines and the works being presented on the program. The English translation is below:

You present in Montpellier Danse a 4-piece program: Tread by Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer's Trio A With Flags, Steve Paxton's Goldberg Variations and your latest creation American Landscapes. What do these 4 pieces have in common? The historical works by Cunningham, Paxton and Rainer frame historical moments that created a context for my artistry to grow in. This is the foundation of Bloodlines and is a way to connect my present with the foundations of my past.

Tread and Trio A With Flags was created in the 70s, Goldberg Variations in the 80s. What do these years represent in the history of dance in the United States? What do these pieces represent especially in the history of American dance? These works represent a total redefinition of what dance can be, how movement can be generated, and what the underpinnings of composition can be on a stage that is not dominated by narrative and meaning. I will say particularly for Trio A with Flags, it was a complete draining of inflection and meaning and compositional skill that were previous prerequisites for what we thought a good dance was. Goldberg Variations, and to some extent, Tread, also present a relaxed kind of compositional. Particularly with Goldberg, an improvisational composition based on simple themes involving unexplored terrain in the body, particularly the use of the spine.

What is the story of Goldberg Variations? Why did you choose to put this particular Steve Paxton piece together? I met Steve as a noice dancer when I was 18 years old at a time when he was just inventing contact improvisation. I have seen his body of work first hand over the course of my career and he was in fact one of my first important teachers. Goldberg Variations is an improvisational work as performed by Paxton and my proposition to him was that I would memorize one of his improvisations as a kind portrait to give back to him. I felt that my unique position as an early student of his while he was brokering this kind of vocabulary put me in a very unique position to do this kind of work in honor of him. Many, many artists can employ his principles, but I felt that with my historical relation with him, and the talent of my current dancer Nicholas Sciscione, we could come very close to a deep portrayal of the essence of Paxton’s dancing.

How did the re-creation take place? Did Steve Paxton intervene in the transmission process? What does Steve Paxton think of the covers of these old pieces? Steve sent me a particular evening performance of the Goldberg Variations from 1992. With my dancers, I set out to reproduce an excerpt as closely as possible to what we saw in that performance. We then began to send rehearsal videos to Paxton for his feedback. He made various recommendations and suggestions of ways to investigate other kinds of movement that might inflect what he was seeing in our work. For example, he suggested several rehearsals with eyes closed, as well as working with dancers of different abilities and physical limitations to give us a new perspective.

What is the story of Trio A With Flags? Why did you choose to put Yvonne Rainer's piece together, in particular? Yvonne and Steve were friends and colleagues and their work informed each other greatly during their careers. I grew up with a close working relationship with both of them and they were stripping down movement in very similar ways, all parallel to the Minimalist movement of visual arts in New York in the 70’s. Strip work down to its essence the fact of its motion devoid of meaning, inflection, and preconceived destination!

How did the re-creation take place? Did Yvonne Rainer participate in the transmission process? What does Yvonne Rainer think of the covers of these old pieces? I’ve known Yvonne socially and professionally since I began dancing in New York in 1978. I was the first male dancer of the Trisha Brown Company and Yvonne and Trisha were very good friends as well. I got a lot of social time with Yvonne who was then making films and not so much choreography. It was a great pleasure to have her in the room to give us advice about Trio A while having one of her dancers do the heavy lifting in the transmission process. There were times they disagreed about various things, and that was all the more fun. Restaging a work is not an exact science, and part of the beauty of the experience is that everyone sees everything from a different point of view, but somehow we arrive at an agreement of what the work is.

Your company has already taken back several pieces of Merce Cunningham. How is Tread a special piece? What does Tread represent in Merce Cunningham's work? Tread represents a very special moment in Merce’s history. It is very playful and very involved with the interaction and lifting and hauling of the dancers through the space. While there is certainly an element of what we know as “Cunningham dancing,” what makes this unusual is its sense of interpersonal play between the dancers. It also has an incredible set by Bruce Nauman, which is a row of oscillating fans between the dance and the audience creating a barrier which the audience must look through to see the dance.

In what way do you think Merce Cunningham's dance is contemporary, current, today? Merce decentralized the stage, giving the body an infinite number of centers and facings. We are all still dealing with the repercussions of that kind of decentralization both on the stage and in contemporary culture.

Why do you think contemporary choreographers are so interested in today's notions of dance history, tradition, heritage? I can’t speak for other choreographers, but I created the Bloodlines project 5 years ago because a generation of great thinkers was passing away. Revolutionary artists that challenged the possibilities of what dance can be and how we perceive it. I felt that it was crucial to begin restaging their works while there were still dancers who had touched these masters personally so that transmission could be body to body. Going back to some of these great landmark works in the history of postmodernism is like re-reading great works of literature, but this time I get to do it with a lifetime of experience under my belt. Understanding where we came from evolved has become incredibly important to me in understanding where I am today.

How does American Landscapes enter into dialogue with this dance story? The assumptions and basis for my compositional field in American Landscapes have been looked at through the lens of historical works I have been restaging through Bloodlines over the last 5 years. Because I see American Landscapes as a series of conversations with American culture about how space is shaped, reexamining my compositional techniques, many of them brokered through the lens of the Judson artist has been a crucial element of the works creation.

http://www.maculture.fr/entretiens/stephen-petronio-bloodlines/ 

An insider’s look... 

TREAD (1970)  Company Premiere

CHOREOGRAPHER: Merce Cunningham MUSIC: For 1, 2, or 3 People by Christian Wolff, performed live by members of Composers Inside Electronics - Seth Cluett, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Cecilia Lopez, Michael Schumacher SET: Bruce Nauman COSTUMES: After the design by Merce Cunningham, recreated by Jeffrey Wirsing LIGHTING: Richard Nelson STAGED BY: Jennifer Goggans PERFORMED BY: Bria Bacon, Taylor Boyland, Ernesto Breton, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, Ryan Pliss, Nicholas Sciscione, Mac Twining, Megan Wright GUEST ARTIST: Brandon Collwes

This performance of Tread is part of the official Cunningham Centennial Celebration.

LISE FRIEDMAN ON BLOODLINES

I first saw Stephen Petronio dance in 1979. He was the first, and only, man in the Trisha Brown Company. Intense and virtuosic, he brought a liquid, muscular urgency to Brown’s filigreed movement. These same qualities, super-charged by his dances’ signature whipping limbs, have fueled his work for the last thirty-five years.

From the start Petronio’s work has captured the pulse and anxieties of modern life. In the early solo #3, wearing a white button-down shirt and black slacks and rooted to one spot, his torso, arms, and head flail and twitch — he’s a furious, frustrated everyman. The epic Locomotor/Non Locomotor (2015) conjures a tough and tender world in which duets, trios, quartets, suddenly form and just as unexpectedly disperse. In one standout moment, dancers leap backward, blithely describing a gorgeous arc around the stage. Last year’s ultra-spare Hardness 10, its title a reference to the imperviousness of the diamond, is a kind of treatise on walking through and with a crowd, an ode to the city streets and to the process of becoming stronger.

Almost five years ago, Petronio took a surprising turn. While continuing to make his own dances, he initiated Bloodlines, a commitment to bringing the work of American postmodern dance masters into his company, specifically the work of the artists who formed him. The plan was to have dancers who had experienced the work first-hand teach the pieces to the Petronio Company. It was a huge gamble, and precisely where Petronio’s passion and decisiveness were key. The first to be included was Merce Cunningham’s eccentric and mysterious 1968 RainForest. This was quite a reach, and therefore quite a risky business. How would Petronio’s dancers, who had spent years mastering his work, fare in the face of a technique so fundamentally different and notoriously difficult? Would they get ensnared in its inevitable idiosyncrasies? Would they find it hard to perform alongside an electronic score that provides neither beat nor narrative? Would they trip on Andy Warhol’s mylar balloons?

The Petronio dancers took it on. Three members of the former Cunningham Company came into the Petronio studio, and, in just three weeks, transmitted the dance, moment by moment, step by step, body to body. This was a dramatic undertaking, revealing the push and pull, the doubt, and ultimately the satisfaction the dancers felt when they finally made the piece their own.

Subsequent Bloodline works include wonderful and significant dances by Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton. Last year, Petronio’s dancers performed the witty Cunningham work Signals. This season, Petronio premieres his own American Landscape, with design by Robert Longo and an original score by the Dutch composer Jozef van Wissem and the filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch. Drawing on the multiple facets that make up this United States, Petronio will, as he inevitably does, bring something of what’s happening in the world outside the theater onto his stage. Also on the program is Coverage, a 1970 solo by the too-little-known Judson Dance Theater artist Rudy Perez, and Tread (1970), the company’s third dance by Cunningham, with a set by Bruce Nauman — a row of ten industrial fans parked across the front of the stage. With the addition of Tread, the Petronio Company is now the American company with the most works by Cunningham in its repertory.

The Bloodlines project in no way tethers Petronio to the past. With all that this endeavor has so far achieved, and with Petronio at the height of his choreographic powers, quite the opposite is true.

Lise Friedman, an adjunct professor at NYU’s Gallatin School, is the author of several books and, with director Maia Wechsler, co-producer of the 2018 feature documentary “If the Dancer Dances,” which follows the Stephen Petronio Company as they struggle to reconstruct Merce Cunningham’s “RainForest,” revealing what it takes to keep a dance alive. She was a member of the Cunningham Company from 1977-84.

"The style is informal and sometimes fascinatingly awkward, as if a musical impulse in one part of the body directed other parts of the body to move helplessly. The head often has a life of its own, bending up and down and side to side in circles.”

-Alastair Macaulay speaking about Excerpt from Goldberg Variations for The New York Times  

Shown above, Stephen Petronio Company dancer Megan Wright performs Steve Paxton’s Excerpt from Goldberg Variations. Megan learned the solo for the Company’s performances at The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done. She opened the program with her female version of the piece, something not seen before. Her performance was named one of Wendy Perron’s “Best of 2018″ dance pieces.

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REHEARSAL AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

On December 9-13, 2018, Stephen Petronio Company performed versions of Steve Paxton’s Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera (I Would Like to Make a Phone Call). Sandwiched between the dancer’s own versions of the duets, the Company played with Stephen Petronio and Randy Warshaw’s 1982 version in this full company structured improvisation. Though the choreography was set, the dancers were free to walk in and out of the piece, sitting on the back wall during moments of rest. This freedom created surprising moments and fun interactions that the dancers could play with.

INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN PETRONIO: Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera

“I met Steve Paxton my first year. I had him for college and he was a guest artist doing a workshop. I became impassioned by his work, and so I began studying improvisation with him all through my college years... I became friends with Steve and there was going to be a performance. He approached me and Randy Warshaw, who I had gone to college with and who was studying contact improvisation. Steve at first said, “I’ve got this score that I did with Bob Rauschenberg back in the 60s, would you guys like to do it?” and we said yes. 

He gave us this giant poster board, which I fell in love with. I guess I had it in my room for a while. It had various cut out pictures of sports and news figures cut out and pasted on to it in a sequence from the upper left going to the right and then down the page. Horizontal lines and various configurations and bodies and mostly in a duet form. The only thing I really remember about the visual score is that there were dots, a series of black dots next to the pictures. Some had one, some had two, some had four. And Steve wasn’t with us... He didn’t explain anything about it he just said “there’s the score, make a duet.” And so Randy and I were pretty good, pretty friendly and plus we were dancing with Trisha Brown so we were around each other a lot and we just began working on it and trying to figure out what to do. We were both pretty seasoned improvers at that point, so we began making a duet that we memorized.”

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INTERVIEW WITH JENNIFER GOGGANS: Tread

“There’s a particular challenge in staging this work because we have very limited resources for the choreographic materials. We have a film. Which with any film there are a lot of close up and so certain things are missing. And then there is a rather fuzzy, back of house, capture. Between the two, I managed to figure out everything. I also used some contact sheets from a photographer James Klosty who photographed the company for years. There were some photographs on those contact sheets that were particularly helpful for some group shapes where everyone is in a clump. So to see everyone’s position. There were difficult moments that were difficult to discern. I think with all of it, I managed, but I would say it required a great deal of detective work to fine all of the choreography.” 

Cunningham stager Jennifer Goggans speaks about the resources she used to set Tread (1970) on the Petronio dancers. Jennifer learned every role in the piece in order to teach each dancer the specific choreography. The first photo shows her notes used during rehearsals. The second photo shows Jennifer showing the dancers movement from a performance video of Tread taken in 1970.

IN THE STUDIO: Rudy Perez

“Rudy is 89 and he is amazing and spectacularly passionate. What an honor!” 

SPC dancer Ernesto Breton worked with choreographer Rudy Perez in Los Angeles on Perez’s solo titled Coverage (1970), a piece not performed since 1989. His experimentations in this piece explore minimalism and theatricality, essentialism and drama. 

FROM THE NEWS: Coverage

A VISUAL SCORE: Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera

The dance realization of this artwork titled Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera (I Would Like to Make a Phone Call) was originally performed by Steve Paxton & Robert Rauschenberg in 1964. The choreography is drawn from the various photos above, the dancers imitating the positions of the subjects but executing them in their own artistic way. Paxton calls this type of choreographic inspiration “graphic options.” The red and blue dots indicate to which dancer the pose was assigned to. The arrows inform the sequence to follow. 

MERCE CUNNINGHAM CENTENNIAL: Stephen Petronio

A post from the Merce Cunningham Trust. Stephen was featured in honor of the Cunningham Centenary. Read his statement on how Merce influenced his dance career.

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Stephen Petronio dances his piece, "MiddleSexGorge"#merce2me

How has Merce Cunnungham influenced you? "Something about Merce:

From the book to the TV screen and cinema, the sketch and painting and onto the proscenium, the space for creation all around me is flattened—a two-dimensional surface on which to make marks. That’s how it is. There is the space of imagination after all, rich with depth and dimension, but that’s difficult for my then young mind to articulate. I can sense it but can’t give it form.

TALK BACK SESSION: If the Dancer Dances

FIRST REHEARSALS: Coverage 

Though Coverage (1970) is a solo piece, Ernesto Breton and Elijah Laurant begin their first rehearsals moving together as they decipher the choreography of Rudy Perez. The piece consists of many pedestrian movements - jogging, walking, marching and jumping - as seen in the video above. 

Video by Alessandra Larson of Ernesto Breton and Elijah Laurant of Stephen Petronio Company in their first rehearsal of

Coverage

PIECING IT TOGETHER: Coverage from the archives

Company member, Ernesto Breton, meticulously deciphers and maps out Coverage (1970), a solo created by Rudy Perez. The company began this reconstruction for Bloodlines at the Petronio Residency Center during their week long residence in July 2018.