Stephen Petronio Company at The Joyce Theater

Emily Stone (r) and Cori Kresge of Stephen Petronio Company
in Trisha Brown's Glacial Decoy
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Trisha Brown can claim special place in Stephen Petronio's artistic DNA and now, as well, in his "Bloodlines" series, a platform for reviving masterworks by choreographers who have informed his practice. Last spring at The Joyce Theater, Stephen Petronio Company launched Bloodlines with performances of Merce Cunningham's RainForest (1968). For the current Joyce season, the troupe has mounted Glacial Decoy, the 1979 landmark collaboration between Brown and Robert Rauschenberg that features the artist's unforgettable costumes and visual design.

A line from Petronio's brand new ensemble piece--Big Daddy (Deluxe), second work on the bill--reminded me of the one concern I had about Glacial Decoy. Towards the end of Big Daddy (Deluxe), a danced/spoken homage to the choreographer's late father, Petronio says, "Death, like gravity, steals the show." Gravity, ultimately, does not steal Glacial Decoy, but Petronio's dancers keep us too aware of it, and what might be a silken transition for a Trisha Brown dancer looks like a split-second negotiation with gravity, a conscious, visible decision about making one's body disrupt its expected patterns to do the unusual. Brown's dancers never look heavy or hesitant, even for a nanosecond; they yield, elusive, incomprehensible. Only Petronio's pairing of Emily Stone and Cori Kresge restores Brown's sleight-of-hand, sleight-of-shoulders, torso, everything else. I loved these two sisterly clouds, so much pleasure in their billowing and playfulness.

"The anger forged into my language is utilized as a call to action," wrote the choreographer and ACT UP activist of his ensemble work, MiddleSexGorge, premiered in 1990 but new to me. The problem with MiddleSexGorge is that--aside from its grating, unrelenting music--the work doesn't read as angry. Saucy, at times, and outright orgiastic for the most part. But not angry. I really can't see what it's saying about AIDS, about community, about society. In any case, I longed to be released from it.

Stephen Petronio, at center, in Big Daddy (Deluxe)
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Big Daddy (Deluxe), then, seems the more radical of the two Petronio works on the program. Bear with me for a minute.

Based on Petronio's 2014 solo, Big Daddy, this loving, compassionate piece includes all the dancers in a visualization of the choreographer's memories of life with his Italian-American family and Thomas Petronio, its charismatic, "warm and luminous" patriarch. Bringing Tom, Sunny, Big Daddy--the man had numerous nicknames--to life for us, Petronio narrates throughout and does so imperfectly with stumbles, here and there, and the smallest hint of upwelling emotion. It's a transparent and bravely imperfect un-performance. And this is the reason I find it radical--at least for the Joyce where we expect polish even when polish might not end up meaning anything in particular.

Petronio's victory in Big Daddy (Deluxe) is to make me chuckle a lot more than once and wish that I could have met Tom Petronio and--although he'd probably not care for my politics--shake his hand. What could be more successful than that?

Stephen Petronio Company continues at the Joyce through Sunday, March 13 (various times). For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

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Cori Kresge's poetry in motion

Cori Kresge and Hiroki Ichinose's duet in Do You Like This Title?
(photo: Ryan Reich)

In Wendy Ossserman's Do You Like This Title?, presented in March at Theater for The New City, four dancers struggle to be three-dimensional in a 2D world and two-dimensional in 3D space. Additional movement sources include Hokusai’s manga, Matisse’s cut-outs, 3D printing and the anatomy of the mouth.

Kresge

(photo: Liz Magic Laser)

Wendy Osserman writes of her dancer Cori Kresge,

Cori Kresge first started dancing with me eleven years ago when she was still an undergrad at SUNY Purchase. After a long movement session one day, I suggested she sit and write for awhile. Ever since, Cori has been astounding us all with her dancing as well as her writing.

Enjoy samples of both below!

DO YOU LIKE THIS GARDEN?

by Cori Kresge

In the beginning
there were two howls in the barren black velvet.

There was dust, lots of it,
and an old screen door flapping on its hinge in the white wind.

Turn around and see spring,
budding It's pink tongue.

In fact, spring makes tongues of us all.
A wrist also wants to eat the amber light.

A breast bone wants to lick the hyacinth from the dewy air.
And here is where it gets interesting:

when the pair of mantises quibbles about who said what,
whose turn it is to be fig leafed,

which limbs to keep or discard,
they go for an evening walk as one.

A walk on the air perhaps.

This spring, stem cells in bloom
are sold in tidy bundles.

Kinkos makes kidneys in a gyrating cube,
ready-to-wear in translucent pinks and grays.

Soon nature will pulse with new mechanical precision;
Swatch brand bromeliads that promise to be better than real.

New guns full of hope for making the world a better place,
new knives for carving the air into roses.

At the drawing board of obsessive doodling
where ideas are piling up in crisp new shapes,

squeezed from the minds of Apple and Google,
we wait to pour through into the next dimension.

Like the goo in a 3D printer
in a silicon dream, waiting to join the pulse of life

without beginning/without end. Amen.

CORI  KRESGE is a NYC based dancer and writer. She was a member of the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group and part of the Cunningham teaching faculty. Cori graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in dance and the Dean’s Award for "breaking the mould." She was a recipient of the Darmasiswa International Scholarship to travel to Indonesia and study traditional Balinese dance. Cori is thrilled to be dancing with Wendy Osserman for over 10 years. She also currently works with Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Reiner, Ellen Cornfield, Rebecca Lazier, and film maker Zuzka Kurtz. In recent years she has worked with Jose Navas/Compagnie Flak, Sarah Skaggs, and performance artist Liz Magic Laser.

On the AstroTurf, somewhat elevated

L to r: Cori Kresge, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener perform "r e v e a l" at Elevated Acre
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

At 1:30pm, all looked serene. Three dancer-collaborators--Cori Kresge, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener--wandered onto the AstroTurf at Elevated Acre, a windswept park up an escalator and 'round the back of an office building not far from Wall Street and a noisy heliport on the Hudson.

Kresge and Riener (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

At first, r e v e a l slowly, even shyly disclosed its eccentric self with the trio repeatedly drawing together and spreading apart, a triangle breathing, stretching, morphing and, for a moment, vanishing. 

Rashaun Mitchell (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Then Riener buried himself beneath some waxy-looking yellow throw, while Mitchell became a human pretzel propelling and stumbling his way across the fake grass, and Kresge reappeared adorned in black plastic that she worked like some Loie Fuller finery, elegant and dramatic.

Four views of Cori Kresge (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Silas Riener rising from the "grass" (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

And then the rain came (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Wind blew, the sky opened up--at first, taunting, then with increasing vehemence--and most of the audience fled, either back to their offices or to shallow overhangs at the back of 55 Water Street. In heavy downpour, the unperturbed, determined dancers--now dressed in skimpy nude-colored costumes draped in rippling, flame-orange fabric--darted all over the wet AstroTurf. Risky business.

Let's hope the weather r e v e a l s a kinder face on Friday and Saturday (July 5-6), when the trio offer their performance again at 1:30pm, part of this summer's diverse and imaginative River to River Festival. 

But, just in case, pack your brolly.

Free, as always. 

Elevated Acre
55 Water Street, Manhattan
Look for the hot pink River to River flag, and  ride the elevator up.
(map/directions)

From the artists

r e v e a l is a site-specific dance work. It includes transformation, nature, magic, latex, flaying, ecstasy, skin, hair, creatures, monsters, fantasy, aggression, impulses, the future, peristalsis, masks, perception, articulation, control, freedom, exertion, underwater trees, silk, minotaurs, semiotics, aliens, animals, sorcery, urgency, agency, fluency, and the translational acts of communicating through space and movement.

Part of the conceptual and choreographic material for r e v e a l must be attributed to initial explorations that were part of Harrison Atelier’s large-scale installation VEAL, with choreography by Silas Riener in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell and Cori Kresge.