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.

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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🎬 Vídeo: “Healing” de Clams Casino 🐚🕴🏽

🎥 Tim Saccenti

💃 Coreografia: Stephen Petronio Company

▶️ https://youtu.be/_zo_lXJCS9U

💿 Healing

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.

Stephen Petronio on Contact Improvisation

Where it all began...Steve Paxton and Contact Improvisation

“Was it a coincidence that brought Steve Paxton to Hampshire College as guest artist that first semester that I found my body? Steve Paxton was a leading member of Judson Dance Theater, a renegade band of experimental thinkers formed in the 60s. These innovators were reshaping how American would perceive dance for generations to come. They smashed the hierarchical world where all things related to center stage in the flat screen of the proscenium, and replaced it with a shifting spherical world in which all information was equal. In short they mounted a revolution in modern dance that eventually would come to be known as postmodern.”

[Excerpt from Stephen Petronio’s memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict]