Anniversary Season
Stephen
Petronio Company
The Joyce Theater
New York City
March 27, 2005 (matinee)
by
Nancy Dalva
copyright
©2005 by Nancy Dalva
It
was Easter Sunday, so I thought I would go see Stephen Petronio costumed
by Tara Subkoff of Imitation of Christ. You know, the usual subversive,
transgressive, glossy, downtown thing Petronio has had going for twenty
years, and is celebrating with a retrospective including "Prelude"
(2000), "Lareigne" (1995), "bud" (2005), and the disgustingly
but amusingly named "Middlesex Gorge" (1990).It turned out I
saw something else, though—I saw that underneath the fashion-y,
arty affect Petronio has been quietly pursuing something purely formal,
first building up a vocabulary of slashing, loping, space eating movements
with very little transitional material if any, and later a more compressed,
close-to-the-body, gestural kind of choreographic utterance. His newest
duet, "bud," which will be part of a longer work, combines the
two kinds of movement. It is something new for Petronio, and it is something
interesting.
A duet for Thang Dao and Gino Grenek, who wear red underpants—there are always underpants at Petronio, he's the king of underpants and Tara Subkoff is the queen—and half a suit jacket apiece, held on with elastic bondage-y straps. Their movement is co-dependent, in a way Petronio's movement is not. If the work springs from two different ways of moving himself around, there is a successful integration, or fusion, here. Watching the men support each other, follow each other, parallel each other, I realized that what Petronio is doing is the opposite of deconstruction. He is not taking apart something, he is making something up. So, despite the fashionable surfaces of his work, and their clever allusions and occasional literary or cinematic themes and such, the movement is not anything fashiony, or even fashionable. It is made up out of the way Petronio moves, and here he has successfully transferred that idiosyncratic excellence to a fine pair of dancers.
As
for the rest, the program was not as strong as, perhaps, would be a program
of the most recent work, but the instructive, longish (fifteen year) view
made up for that. Ken Tabachnik, now general manager of the New York City
Ballet and still the excellent resident lighting designer for Petronio,
has a marvelous knack for lighting the dancers rather than the space they
are in, so that each Petronio dancer appears like fireworks, or a tracer
streaking across the night sky, trailing gossamer bits of costume (Manolo
for "Lareigne") or covered in petals, or a stark leotard, or
a corset (H. Petal—is that a real name, or a nom de costume, one
wonders?—for "MiddleSex Gorge." ) They move with a low,
naturally carried weight, but they catch in the memory in mid-air, in
movement, always most interesting visually when all together on stage,
yet psychologically arresting individually. Time was, I would have said
Petronio himself was the most interesting and the most arresting, but
that is no longer the case. I cannot even say how very very much credit
is due to him for stepping back in his work, passing on the power, the
spotlight, the moves. He danced in "Middlesex" as a member of
the ensemble, and in a bow ceded the applause to his duet partner. This
was not mere stage graciousness, this was grace, and from a man wearing
petal pedal pushers, and, indeed, a corset. A lot has been made about
that—the corset, the corsets. If dressing up his movement like that
has helped get it out in front of the public, and keeps it there, hooray
for corsets. Blessed be the ties that bind, whether elastic and ribbon,
or interest and attention, and congratulations to Stephen Petronio for
twenty fairly fabulous years.
“Lareigne”
image of Gerald Casel, photo by Beatriz Schiller
“Prelude” image of the company, photo by Ellen Crane
Volume 3,
No. 13
March 28, 2005
copyright
©2005
Nancy Dalva
www.danceviewtimes.com
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