Stephen Petronio: Purveyor of the Impermanent

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Stephen Petronio:

A Purveyor of the Impermanent written by Philip Szporer

Stephen Petronio dances with a kind of intelligent silkiness and full-throttle brashness. He’s a master in the art of making quick-study spatial pictures of movement that click in your mind’s eye. In fact, he learned from the best.

For a bunch of years he performed with American maverick Trisha Brown, whose abstract pure dance language he’s called “a twisted blend of wild-ass, intuitive sensuality and cool rigor.” As a choreographer with his own sensational, explosive New York-based company for now close to 30 years running, the former pre-med student stokes the stage with his hypnotizing torquing movement and an altogether more aggressive and feverish speed.

Indisputably he is one of the most clear and eloquent voices in American contemporary dance circles.

In conversation, his seductive verbal flair fleshes out a bounty of articulate ideas about movement, the body and experimental tendencies. “I was born verbal. That’s transformed into physical articulation,” Petronio conveyed to me in a past interview.

For some time, he’s been exploring the architecture of space and the architecture of loss in his choreography, being significantly attuned to the ephemerality of dance and the impermanence of the moving body.

“That’s the great allegory for this (time),”

Stephen Petronio

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“Underland”

photo by Sarah Silver

Petronio says. “If nothing else, we’re impermanent.”

More recently, he’s said, “The thing about dance that is so beautiful is that it disappears the minute you see it. And the frustrating thing about dance is that it disappears the minute your see it.” And that’s Petronio’s hallmark: engineering the fleeting nature of movement by overloading the senses, putting several things on stage at once, so that you can only catch glimpses. The New York Times calls him “a superb craftsman who knows how to build and layer a dance, pace the whiplash speed and… create intriguing configurations through spatial patterns.”

In the rehearsal process, Petronio acknowledges he tries to look for a visceral, physical response to the ideas he presents his magnetic dancers. What results in “The Architecture of Loss” (2012) is “a big whack of full-bodied movement,” as he describes it. Dancers generally train to be attuned to the space, but here he says he “turns that over.” There are phrases of movement that don’t have resting place. The bodies

have “little surges”, he says, resulting in their “painting” the space with their movement. He purposefully keeps the dancers off-kilter. “The audience can feel that, not just see that,” he states. This piece, as dance writer Deborah Jowitt notes, is “fraught with more stillness and more silence than any of the works he’s made over the last couple of decades.”

While he’s said he doesn’t have much patience for “representing spirituality in an earnest way,” what he tackles here are questions about how to continued...

Stephen Petronio Company

“Architecture of Loss” “Underland” November 14, 2012 at 8pm www.stephenpetronio.com Dance Series support provided by

The Cheng Family Foundation with additional support by

Kari and Michael Kerr & Sonnet Technologies

IRVINE

BARCLA Y THEATRE

www.thebarclay.org

IRVINEBARCLAYPRESENTS the 2012-13 International Contemporary Dance Series

“What’s concealed is as important as what’s revealed.”

- Stephen Petronio

build on something that’s disappearing.

“What’s concealed is as important as what’s revealed,” he says. Petronio’s choices zero in “on a continuum of energy consciously directed through the body and out into space,” addressing flow and transition challenging speed and stasis. And it further illuminates an urgency in the work and his ‘now or never’ sensibility.

Petronio, it appears, has always seemed fascinated by the idea of taking things to the extreme and reporting back. Press clippings reveal that in arts circles he was a loud fixture in an era of dramatic social change when private sexuality had become the grist of public politics. In the 80s he knew that pushing the sexuality side of things in his work needed to be done. Petronio pronounced himself a queer artist early on, worked with AIDS activist group ACT-UP and incessantly denounced the failed American ideals championed

by Republican stalwart Senator Jesse Helms. Yet as far as becoming a poster child for the gay body politic, Petronio has since moved away from that kind of stance because of its inherent creative restrictions. But his social mores haven’t changed and he says the work continues to be distinctly sensual.

For this Barclay engagement, the

Petronio company is also presenting excerpts from “Underland”, originally created for the Sydney Dance Company, an homage of sorts to Aussie musician Nick Cave, who has been called the “lyrical prince of darkness”. The music tells stories about people, tales of lust, murder and death. In terms of the dance, Petronio says the piece “welds a classical sense of technique with my sequential and aggressive movement.”

Petronio is street smart and fierce and uncompromisingly naked in his ambition to keep dance vital. But this former veteran of outrage – equally noted for his extravagant nature and the wild, in-your-face, punching energy of his work – has come of age. Though he’s stated he’s still “looking for edges, wanting to go deeper. Pushing is not the right word... penetrating... I’ll always be in love with wildness; but not ranting.”

Just a few years ago he talked about wanting his mark to be indelible. “The body is not shy and my stage is not shy about where it’s going. I’m talking about leaving skid marks in space. The dances we make are like getting into a sports car, and sometimes it’s very out of control.”

It’s also about keeping dance relevant, and for Petronio that means embracing other disciplines. Past

collaborators have included such visual artists as Cindy Sherman and Anish Kapoor, as well as musicians Diamanda Galas, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Developing wide multigenre tastes means “choosing people that provoke or inspire me.” In “The Architecture of Loss”, he’s again working with longtime resident lighting designer and visual designer Ken Tabachnik, but all the other major collaborators hail from Iceland: composer Valgeir Sigurösson (founder of the Bedroom Community record label) has created a chilly, eerie score, with contributions by New York-based composer Nico Muhly; costume designers Gudrun & Gudrun have created loosely hung knits for the piece, conveying the idea of fragility and disintegration; and artist Rannvá Kunoy’s grey cloudy paintings of fog hanging in the cold air, projected onto three large screens at the back of the stage, surround the dancing bodies.

Despite Petronio’s renown and international status, he’s never forgotten his roots or his mates: “Everyone can move away from you, but you can’t forget your history. That history comes with you. The more you embrace it, the more it transforms you.” These days, Petronio is aware that he brings an existential emotional state into the studio – during the making of “Architecture of Loss” his father fell ill. So details about the movement are important, but finally it’s the emotional resonance of those details that matters most.

“I’m talking about leaving skid marks in space.”

- Stephen Petronio

Philip Szporer is a Montreal-based lecturer, writer and filmmaker.

IRVINEBARCLAYPRESENTS the 2012-13 International Contemporary Dance Series