#petronioco

ANNA HALPRIN + THE COURTESAN AND THE CRONE (1999)

In Performance: Glacial Decoy

TRISHA BROWN + GLACIAL DECOY (1979) CHOREOGRAPHY: Trisha Brown SET, COSTUMES, VISUAL DESIGN:  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. NOTES FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

The Joyce Theater March 8 - 13, 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.