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.
Davalois Fearon, left, with Gino Grenek and Nicholas Sciscione,
members of the Stephen Petronio Dance Company
(photo: Sarah Silver)
The 30th anniversary of the Stephen Petronio Dance Companyhappens to coincide with another notable anniversary for this renowned and stylish troupe. Dancer and Education Coordinator Davalois Fearon is marking ten years working with Petronio. She's excited to be part of the launch of the company's five-year Bloodlines project which will pair classics of postmodern dance with Petronio's repertory. This season, the troupe will present Merce Cunningham's RainForest (1968) alongside the world premiere of Petronio’s Locomotor/Non Locomotor at The Joyce Theater (April 7-12).
A native of Jamaica, Fearon was raised in the South Bronx from the age of four with her siblings. She remembers her immediate surroundings as "not the safest neighborhood."
"But my parents did a good job of sheltering us," she says. "I had no idea that I was in Crack Central. We would go to school and then come straight back. When I was at home, it was like going back to Jamaica. I had a very Jamaican upbringing."
She's been dancing, she says, "since I was out of the womb" and would force her older sister--"quiet and more like a bookworm but always supporting me"--to put on shows for the family gatherings.
"Jamaicans love to dance, and it would be rooted in reggae with a gymnastic influence. As I got older, I got exposed to pop, hip hop and salsa. I would always be performing for anyone who would look!"
In eighth grade, she took part in an eight-week Alvin Ailey outreach program where she had her first exposure to ballet, studying with Ron Alexander. Her parents, like many Caribbean immigrants, foresaw a secure career path--perhaps medicine or law--and did not support the idea that their daughter might choose dance instead.
"In their minds, they had the big American dream, and they wanted that for us."
Money was tight, too.
"I auditioned in socks, because I didn't have ballet shoes and didn't know where to get them," she recalls, marveling that she made it into the school anyway. In fact, Fearon had to sit out her first class at Ailey, lacking the proper attire for class--a school requirement. "My first pair of ballet shoes, tights and leotard were from the lost-and-found." But dance was, for her, "like a calling, something I had to do."
Today, in her role as a dance teacher, she looks for similar desire and focus in her young students.
"You have to want it so bad that you're looking for every little detail that the teacher is giving you. I have this one student, about five years old. In her first class, she didn't know anything--didn't know a plié, didn't know first position. Now she knows the whole class by heart--there, right in the front, in first position, ready to go before anyone else. 'I know what's coming!' It's beautiful, really beautiful."
With role models like Ailey, Denise Jefferson and Judith Jamison--"the pride they brought to the work"--Fearon made steady and accelerated progress up the levels of Ailey training.
"They saw something in me that I didn't know that I had, and that helped build my confidence."
She won a scholarship to Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, where she earned her BFA in 2005. In a way, even her parents' resistance helped strengthen her resolve even as she was forced to take numerous jobs to support her pursuit.
"Junior year, I thought about auditioning. I had to show my parents that I can do this. You don't have to worry about me."
She auditioned for Petronio and spent her senior year as an apprentice to the troupe.
Today, her parents could not be more proud, her mother remembering being able to buy Fearon at least one crucial item--a pair of pointe shoes.
Davalois Fearon
in Petronio's Beauty and the Brut
(photo: Sarah Silver)
So, what's most interesting, challenging and eye-opening about dancing for a maverick like Stephen Petronio?
"Stephen is an incredible mover," she says. "He started late as a dancer, and that speaks to me. I started with reggae and hip hop and salsa and then started training.
"We were in rehearsal, and Stephen was working with Joshua Tuason on a solo, and he did a syncopated move that reminded me of something African that I knew from my Ailey training. And here is Stephen, you know, tall, white, bald man doing that and doing figure eights a lot like salsa dancing. The freedom and choices that he comes up with I love because I have that wide background, too. I can do that, too. I can move into a moonwalk one minute and a so de chat the next. His range of movement is all over the place--a lot of fun!"
But, at first, the work was just different enough from what she'd seen of conventional ballet and modern dance training to be a challenge. Remembering, her initial efforts to enter Petronio's philosophy and approach to movement, Fearon took a proposal to him. She wanted to write a syllabus as a guide for other company members and future recruits.
"I would see new dancers come into the company and go through the same struggles. 'You know what? I don't get it.' It was a need I saw not only for our dancers but for our outside teaching work, decoding what he would do in a way that, say, a first-year Juilliard student could understand."
Interviewing students gave her insight into what they needed from the company, and she was able to convince Petronio to create an education department.
Besides performing and teaching, Fearon has been developing her own voice as a choreographer. One upcoming project--Consider Water, her first full-length piece--was inspired by a talk with a UN ambassador working on issues of water-related disasters and scarcity of safe drinking water in many regions of the world. He happened to read about Fearon in a New York Times article and reached out to her. She told him of water shortages in Jamaica and how her family paid to get water shipped to her grandmother's house. The ambassador simply challenged her, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"I was thinking, Wow, I don't have much money. I can't save the world. But I have dance."
Excerpts from Consider Water,
a work in progress choreographed by Davalois Fearon
with music by Mike McGinnis
Fearon began work on Consider Water as a way to raise awareness of water-related concerns. The project has taken off, connecting her to supporters and collaborators such as the Bronx Council on the Arts (BCA) and the Bronx River Alliance, a respected local environmental organization. Through the BCA, which awarded her a 2014 BRIO fellowship, she will present excerpts of Consider Water at the Andrew Freedman Home, an arts-related community center, on May 1, and at the Bronx River Alliance Fish Festival on June 6. She plans to preview the finished piece in September at BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance).
To learn more about Fearon and her Consider Water project, visit her Web site here. See the Stephen Petronio Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, April 7–12. For complete schedule and ticketing information, click here.
******
Davalois Fearon is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer born in Jamaica and raised in The Bronx, New York. In 2005, Fearon received a BFA from the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance program and has since performed and taught around the world with Stephen Petronio Company, staged its repertory, assisted as rehearsal director, and is currently its Education Coordinator. As a choreographer, she is a recipient of the 2014 Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO fellowship and a member of The Joyce Theater’s Prestigious Young Leaders Circle Artists’ Committee. Her choreography has been presented throughout New York City, including at Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, Bronx Art Space, Roulette, The Vasquez, the Inception to Exhibition Dance Festival, The Warwick Summer Arts Festival, as well as at the Light Box, Portland OR and Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Fearon has created work in collaboration with internationally renowned poet Patricia Smith, multi-reedist Mike McGinnis, and fashion photographer Nigel HoSang. In addition, she has performed with Daniel Ezralow, Forces of Nature, Ballet Noir, Darrell Robinson, and Ballet International Africans. She is proud to be celebrating her tenth year with the company.
Above: choreographer and Aries, Stephen Petronio
Below: Stephen Petronio Company dances I Drink the Air Before Me (2010)
(photos by Sarah Silver)
Confessions of A Motion Addict
by Stephen Petronio (self-published, 2014; 288 pp.)
ISBN-13: 9781492736547
reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody
I should not have been surprised to learn that Stephen Petronio self-published his memoir, Confessions of A Motion Addict. While the dramatic arc of this world-famous artist's life and career--not to mention the literally boldfaced names he can and does drop, sometimes scandalously--should make any publisher salivate, I can't imagine Petronio having much patience for any middleman or woman dictating how he should tell his own story. The book, all 288 pages of it, is Petronio, through and through. As Spike Lee would say, it's his joint.
The first sixty or so pages, dense and filling, plunge readers deep into childhood and teenage history: richly remembered Italian-American feasts, furtive sexual experiments, rollercoaster drug experiments, precocious insights into the personalities orbiting him, scary dreams, passion, restlessness and, always, a sense of outsider status. By page 67, his artistic fate is sealed when Contact Improvisation makes a serious pass at this newbie Hampshire College student. He subsequently forgets all about taking pre-med. "Inner motor" revved up, mind blown....
I look down my body, and I realize...it's there. I have a body and it is mine. I have a body and do not understand its power or potential or the invisible stories pressing at my skin. I desperately want to move.
Next up? Judson Dance Theater's Steve Paxton, a guest artist at Hampshire. "I am the bastard child of Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown," Petronio will tell us later on, citing his two greatest influences. Brown is, after all, the woman for whom he harnessed up and walked down the wall of a 14th Century French monastery (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building), a feat he repeated a few years ago at the Whitney Museum.
But there's still a lot of getting there until he's there. Petronio takes us along on an adventurous hitchhiking trip through Canada and the West Coast. The young man, exposed to the rigors of nature and the unpredictability of the human animal--enjoyed unexpected kindness of strangers along the way, the occasional minor bummer and one hugely, hugely major one. He's headstrong and lucky and an Aries, and maybe only an Aries would attempt this type of trip in this type of way--"Like all good Aries, I must try to try on every possible lifestyle as my next incarnation"--and get through intact.
Petronio made it through a lot of stuff intact--personal losses, the early years of the AIDS crisis, displacement, along with a lot of other artists, from a gentrifying SoHo, 9/11, a sex-and-drugs lifestyle that could make a rock star look like a rank amateur.
You see the dancer leap and bound, defy gravity and press the boundaries of human movement possibility, yet the mechanics and sensations of these efforts are for the most part concealed. In the mainstream forms of dance, artists often paint a smile over the top of Herculean efforts, but their soul is gritting and grimacing for dear life. The dancer has come to represent the ethereal, outside the law of physics, but we live on the earth and the pull of gravity is definitive. We work with it, attempt to defy it, and yes, we eat real food, pant, smoke, drink, eliminate, copulate, get married, divorced, addicted and healed. We are human. We sometimes break. And it all hurts at some point or another. And we all do something to deal with that pain. Some more than others.
He has chosen to reveal the pull of gravity and the mechanics of living, to conceal nothing, whether it be a personal lapse or a controversial opinion. And with it all, his story provides the kind of energetic rush one comes to expect from his work on the stage.
Learn more about Confessions of A Motion Addicthere.
Before world premiere of "Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30)" (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
View from Eighth Avenue (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
The view of the afterlife offered by Stephen Petronio at The Joyce Theater this week in Like Lazurus Did (LLD 4/30) is so alluring and vital that "(Don't Fear) the Reaper" could be its score. But rather than Blue Oyster Cult, Petronio has the brilliant composer-singer Son Lux whose reverberating instrumental work and vocals saturate everything with shimmering ghosts of music past--at one point, I heard a trace of Dvorak, a composer haunted, in turn, by Black spirituals--and intimations of suffering transcended.
C. J. Camerieri outside The Joyce (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Composer Son Lux outside The Joyce (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Before the performance began, the choreographer, himself, appeared as a "corpse" lying onstage, just visible beneath a slightly raised curtain. When the Joyce named Petronio its first artist-in-residence, is this what they envisioned?
Death also hovered above us in the form of Janine Antoni's installation. The artist lay completely motionless and mostly unseen in a helicopter stretcher suspended above the audience. Waxy models of body parts and skeletal fragments dangled above her from a frame of bars.
To formally open the world premiere, Son Lux and his colleagues--violinist Rob Moose and trumpeter C. J. Camerieri, both from hipster-classical yMusic--formed a procession outside the theater with members of the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Once inside, the chorus filled the aisles and one arm of the theater's balcony.
The ever-present, intimate and eventually propulsive music gave this performance an air of sacred ritual but one slipped free of specific religious or cultural reference. Powerful archetypes of death and renewal cross human cultures and traditions, of course, and Petronio restores these essential symbols to an art form that is, by its very nature, associated with life, youth and vigorous corporeality.
Lights outside The Joyce (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Members of Young People's Chorus of New York City before the procession
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Petronio's ensemble--Julian De Leon, Davalois Fearon, Joshua Green, Gino Grenek, Barrington Hinds, Natalie Mackessy, Jaqlin Medlock, Nicholas Sciscione, Emily Stone and Joshua Tuason--performed what it means to be recently shed of material form. They make their bodies-- suffused with the soft luminosity of Ken Tabachnick's light--open, silky, and capable of great flexibility and response.
Son Lux and musicians on Eighth Avenue (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Rob Moose (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
C. J. Camerieri and Son Lux (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Camerieri's trumpet (c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Stephen Petronio Company's Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30) runs through May 5. For a schedule of performances and to purchase tickets, click here.
The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)
This year, New York has welcomed the annual APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) conference with the kind of "winter weather" that makes chasing downperformances and showings all around town a whole lot easier than anticipated. I like that I can take post-dinner strolls across town to The Joycefor FOCUS DANCE--the series offered by Gotham Arts Exchange and the Joyce and curated, this year, by Jodee Nimerichter (director, American Dance Festival). I'll only get to the first two of FOCUS's four programs, but I'd like to shake the hand of the man or woman who can manage to get to everything invited to or, for that matter, worth seeing during APAP season.
Last night's show at the Joyce featured work by Jodi Melnick and Stephen Petronio. Melnick's Solo, Re(Deluxe), Version (2012), premiered last spring at New York Live Arts and set to the ecstatic, jagged chugging of Steven Reker's rock band, People Get Ready, finally came into focus and took off for me when the choreographer teamed up with another outstanding dancer, Hristoula Harakas. The two women proceeded to slip within and against the space with moves of silk and sophistication, switched on and attuned to one another's force and timing. Everything on that raw stage suddenly warmed up. It looked like love and intuition and mad stellar skill. Also, mad stellar are Gino Grenek and his fellow dancers from Stephen Petronio Company who offered excerpts from three sculpted pieces--Like Lazarus Did (LLD), a work in progress, The Architecture of Loss (2012) and Underland (2011). I'm always drawn to this ensemble's earth-angel quality: You can see how disciplined they are, but they show honor to the body and materiality--and humanity--by playing with gravity, never straining to escape it. Whatever they're dancing, they are sharing this specific time and place with us. Something so arresting and emotionally moving in this for me.
Tonight? Camille A. Brown & Dancers--to see where Brown's going with the provocative Mr. TOL E. RAncE--and Brian Brooks Moving Company (7:30 at The Joyce Theater). For information on the remaining FOCUS DANCE programs through January 13 at the Joyce--including work by Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Doug Varoneand Dancers, Eiko & Koma and John Jasperse--click here and here.
Barrington Hinds in The Architecture of Loss
Stephen Petronio Company
(Photo: Steven Schreiber)
My guest and I spent entirely too much time scheming how one or the other of us would take possession of Stephen Petronio's shiny copper shoes by any means necessary. Then again, we had lots of time to dwell on this because Petronio was doing this queer-New Yorker-in-London spin on Steve Paxton's Intravenous Lecture (1970). Petronio turned Paxton's tale of censorship of nudity into an epic of wearing the wrong shirt at the wrong time in front of the wrong bobby and winding up in jail. Petronio talked to us while a male nurse hooked up to an IV drip and later drifted around the stage, dancing and gesticulating, as an assistant wheeled the IV pole just so and quietly gazed at him. Dancing Petronio--the Rubberband Man--was as amazing as his story's pacing and tone. And it turned out to be possible to stop coveting those shoes long enough to think how great it would be to force Rick Santorum to watch this man work.
Gia Kourlas writes an interesting assessment of Petronio's season in "Explorations of Loss, the Personal and the Public" (The New York Times, March 7), although I certainly don't agree with her preference for practice clothes over wearable art. It just wouldn't be Petronio without the sartorial drama. What's more, the new piece--The Architecture of Loss, scored by Valgeir Sigurdsson--presents the perfect integration of movement, scenic design and costuming. Even more than City of Twist (2002), The Architecture of Loss speaks to me of the atmosphere of 9/11. By that, I don't mean just the images of smoke smudging, and later billowing, across the three background panels, but also the strained, shredding and torn costumes (by Gudrun & Gudrun), as fragile as cobwebs, tinted in ash and charcoal, and the movement that seems to be all incessant, risky transition, even when one or another dancer does not move. This dance embodies insecurity. Nothing looks safe. Everything looks violated. And every action exacts more and more of a price.
In the Ethersketch I solo from Underland (2003), guest artist Wendy Whelan--in gleaming gold fringe and necklace and a crotch-high black skirt--seems to be colliding centuries in her costuming. As for her dancing, the sound equivalent of it would be a trumpet's blast--alarming, exciting and over way before you can ever settle down and get used to it.
UPDATE: Petronio has added three more performances of Ethersketch I--one tomorrow and two on Sunday.
Stephen Petronio and Company continues at The Joyce Theater through Sunday, March 11. Click here for schedule and ticket information.
Dance Magazine's April online issue includes my reviews of Stephen Petronio Company (The Joyce Theater) and Victoria Marks (Danspace Project). Click here for the current reviews. In the print copy of the issue, you'll find my review of Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People (Dance Theater Workshop) as well as my cover story on Aszure Barton.
And check out DM's mini-interviews with ten women choreographers here.
As one of Stephen Petronio’s dances concluded, a woman in the audience pierced the silence with a flute-like “Oooo!” Who could have said it better? This company gives great pleasure, and one appropriate response to its full-out way with music is with a little music of one’s own.
For the current season--a sampler of new, revived and previewed works–top marks go to Michael Badger who opens Without You II (the world premiere) with a warped, rubbery, tortuous solo in which body parts sometimes seem to want to twist off or fly away, with every major muscle group responding to different musical time signatures, some lazy, some driven. A sensationally flexible performer, Badger has a body is acutely attuned to the smart way Petronio plays within a rhythm and subverts expectations just as, with assuredness and without much fanfare, he subverts our expectations around gender.
Elena Demyanenko, another of the strangely appealing odd ducks who dance so thrillingly for Petronio, partners Badger well in the latter part of Without You II, but he’d almost be better off...ahem...without her. Their entwining duet stretches on a bit and I missed the focus of Badger’s outrageous solo. Watch for Badger partnering Gino Grenek in the crisp, forceful and exhilarating male duet that opens Bud Suite (2006), set to Rufus Wainwright’s “Oh What A World.”
Petronio also offers a preview of This Is the Story of a Girl in a World, a suite slated to premiere in 2008, set to music by Antony. It features Grenek, Shila Tirabassi and Amanda Wells in "Bird Gurhl" and an engaging solo, "For Today I am a Boy," danced by the spritely, close-cropped Davalois Fearon wearing an ingenious costume that makes her appear to be shedding a man’s jacket like a snake’s skin and revealing the woman within.
"The Ship Song" (a quartet from Underland, created for Sydney Dance Company in 1997) and ReBourne (a pair of simultaneous, overlapping dances set to Beastie Boys songs) round out the company’s season, which concludes on Sunday. For details and tickets, see www.joyce.org.
