The New York-based choreographer Stephen Petronio has always gravitated toward cooperation in artmaking, mining the modern tradition for something powerfully and fundamentally expressive. Petronio, whose work tends to be pared down, whose dancers mirror everyday movement, whose work has involved forms draped in American flags, worries about the alienation of the modern experience, contemplates the dialogue between music and movement, thinks we have relinquished our grasp on the profound meanings of touch.
The program his company will perform this weekend, Oct. 19 and 20, at Moody Performance Hall for TITAS Presents covers broad ground, drawing from the rich, provocative repertory of the New York-based group that was founded in 1984 and has performed 23 seasons at the Joyce Theater.
Bud, a male duet from 2005 that formed the kernel of Bud Suite (2006), is “a duet I made to a Rufus Wainwright song, back when I was working with him,” Petronio says, evoking a time when he collaborated with songwriter around odes to longing. Themes of mutual support, codependency, “the sense of ‘I can’t get away … and maybe I don’t want to get away’” undergird the work, a beautiful contemporary duet that is exquisitely tactile, full of the tilt and torque of bodies that seem to exercise a gravitational, magnetic pull on each other.
Hardness 10, a recent work, is “based on the idea of the cut of a diamond, the hardest and most brilliant gem,” Petronio says. The work is much more formal.
The company will also perform a solo from the Bloodlines suite that Petronio began in 2014, restaging work by predecessors in nods to an American cast of post-modern choreographers—Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer. This weekend, Petronio Dance Company will perform Bloodlines’ reprise of Steve Paxton’s Excerpt from Goldberg Variations, “originally an improvisational work,” Petronio says, “very special and very meaningful,” a piece that highlights the company’s engagement with contact improvisation.
Always, Petronio, says, he is “trying to give the audience a sense of touching and being touched.” “The idea of touch, how we touch each other”—as a choreographer, he returns to this—“I love what can be passed through the skin. There’s many rules and regulations about that.” He wants to unpin touch from set meanings, to give it room to breathe and move us.
As a veteran choreographer, Petronio is also sensitive to the realities of an artist’s creative life, replete with constraints. Sensitive, that is, to the modern experience. Dancers, he well knows, are “caught between obligations,” struggling in the grind of a Manhattan life, say, “to get to rehearsal for a few short hours.” The paid artist residency program he launched last summer in the Catskills mountains welcomed its first group of awardees, emerging dance companies that came with up to 10 dancers and were given full meals, cars, a studio, and breathing room to create in a small community of focused intensity. He speaks to me about the creative need this filled in his life, and what it meant to bring it to others.
That the residency program corresponds to a much-needed vision of art-making may be surmised by the fact that other artist patrons with similar visions joined in. “[Sculptor] Anish Kapoor had given me a sculpture,” and the permission to sell it as an initial injection of funds, Petronio says. The 24-bed garden was donated by artist Cindy Sherman.
Subtle and athletic, leveraging body weight against the undergirdings of ballet and sometimes pedestrian movement, Petronio’s work is contemplative and existential. “We’re kind of in our boxes right now,” he says. But his dancers seem to both question and claim the ways in which human connections can be made: human touch can cut through as movement elicits feeling. The work is never skin deep—though it is unarguably about surfaces.
