Stephen Petronio Leads a New Movement
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Stephen Petronio was standing in the lobby of the Joyce Theater face-to-face with his public just before curtain when a woman greeted him with a kiss and exclaimed: "This is like greeting the bride before the wedding!"
Over the course of a breathtaking evening, innovation and tradition converged into an alchemical conjuntio of soul and spirit, revealing how far Petronio’s allegiance to formalism has carried him–all the way to a new century of movement!
The marriage celebrates a new dance universe of holistic transparency that is devastatingly personal even as it transcends into the universal. Fittingly, the theme is regeneration and rebirth into a joyous embodiment of the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of opposites. This triumphant emergence into the light marks an authentic resurrection after a prolonged period of darkness in which Petronio penetrated the murky underworld of pedophile sex and gender identity through collaborations with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.
To dance this resurrection Petronio-style delivers a new holistic movement of flowing kundalini energy (two of his company members are yoga instructors) interchanged between media–dance, song, music, poetry, fashion and painterly compositions of superbly androgynous bodies.
More than any other choreographer on the dance scene today, Petronio has long been flirting with the boundary between art and fashion. He proves once again that, while he loves this edge, his dedication to the collaborative process is what prevents him from falling into fashion–a sure dead-end for any avant-garde artist.
How does he manage to navigate this precarious border? He incorporates his tension-filled relationship with fashion into the work itself. For example, in the spectacular Bud Suite, he opens the four movements with Rufus Wainwright singing about men reading fashion magazines while a male duet interacts with Tara Subkoff’s Imitation of Christ costumes incorporating half of a suit jacket bonding naked torsos. This half-exposed/half-covered persona is indicative of the ambivalence regarding not only Petronio’s relationship to fashion, but human relationships in general within a shattered social landscape where the ground is constantly shifting along gender lines. At stake is nothing less than a holistic resolution to the polarizing gender wars and its limited menu of politically correct posturing as a mask for authentic human emotion.
While weaving movement with personal narrative, Petronio is constantly vigilant over his shadow–which is why the shirts worn by the Bud Suite dancers have a bizarre resemblance to straightjackets.
Among the multiple layers of messages the choreographer delivers to the collective consciousness, this season is the essentiality of overcoming the Uncertainty Principle, where the presence of the choreographer affects the outcome of his artistic experiment. At one point in the evening, a motionless figure sits on stage with her back to the audience, indicating that the choreographer has consciously invited the aware ego into the collaborative process. This motif of the inert figure, often in street clothes, was frequently employed by the avant-garde at the close of the 20th Century. But here, at last, we see the holistic outcome of inserting this device into dance: a spiritual evolution of the ego integrated with the development of a new icon that surrounds it. This is where the choreographer becomes so immersed in the collaborative process that his ego identity is superseded by the evolution of art.
This incorporation of the shadow by such a highly developed artist gives us reason to hope. After a pause, a group of young people stream into the audience. This begins BLOOM, a marvelous multi-layered collaboration between Petronio and his eight dancers, Wainwright, the Young People’s Choir of New York City conducted by founder and artistic director, Francisco J. Nunez, and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
The higher consciousness emerging from Petronio’s highly-developed methods of collaboration is strung together by a narrative in song: Whitman ("The Female equally with the Male I sing") and Dickinson ("Hope is the thing with feathers") sung by the soulful Wainwright, and spirit of renewal arising through the youth choir passing through the audience with their rendition of Lux aeterna while clad in T-shirts hand painted with blooming flowers. Rachel Roy’s costumes interpret the renewal of the sacred feminine through buds on the bodice and luminous flow of fabric.
What is blooming in BLOOM is a renewed formalism that gives form to the sacred feminine through androgynous interaction developed from the gender play characterizing Bud Suite. This from a choreographer who came up from the postmodernist deconstructionism of Trisha Brown Company and was, in fact, the first male dancer in her company. Petronio is our guide into a Brave New World where a forceful and direct vocabulary born out of protest and confrontation has the power and strength to deliver a holistic vision of renewal. But doesn’t it make sense to find it in the bloom of a new transgender icon after plummeting through the breakdown of the patriarchal forms?
But BLOOM isn’t the end, for the cycle continues anew. After intermission comes The Rite Part, an ensemble piece from 1992, which interprets Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to a pre-patriarchal mythology of female empowerment, reveals a deep awareness of a new paradigm of interconnection and natural cycle of renewal. The white clad dancer, Shila Tirabassi, surrendering to the feminine spirit is also a yogi. This alchemical projection of the transmuted body arising out of the chaos weds Petronio’s past to his future through the immediacy of life, revealing how his art prefigured his journey.
It is indeed a cause for celebration when an avant-garde pioneer reaches out to his audience with the sincerity that delivers a congratulatory kiss before a performance. Petronio’s commitment to the collaborative process enables him to continually stretch in new directions. In two key decades of millennial transition he has engaged a forceful and direct downtown New York vocabulary of movement to narrate a personal transformation from ego confrontation to the subsuming of ego by a new paradigm of human interconnectedness.
The result is a trajectory embracing a contemporary mythology which brings gender opposition–arising from a confrontational background of proto punk ACT UP aggression–into gender integration. The fuel for this transformation has been a collaborative spirit dedicated to incorporating popular culture into dance.
It is fitting that an exciting new movement is guided by an artist who has pioneered new forms of dance in the avant-garde for 21 years. There is an authentic sincerity to Petronio’s goal of spreading the light into the collective consciousness through innovative pathways of collaboration (he aims to work with local youth choirs in all the cities where the company tours). The result is a much needed boost for both audiences and a dance world starved for artistic direction.
