Stephen Petronio: mixing it up - modern dance choreographer

Dance Magazine, June, 1994 by John Gruen

With his shaven head, strong yet delicate features, and compact body, Stephen Petronio exudes the alertness and vitality of Egyptian sculpture. In the act of dancing he offers the allure of a cat slowly stretching or suddenly darting, every sinew and muscle in perfect harmony and balance. Whether dancing in a tutu, a corset, or a loincloth--Petronio, s choreographic subtext has always dealt with questions of sexual identity through costuming--he, more than any other member of his company, retains a dignity that moves beyond choreographic intent or content.

If Petronio's skills as a dancer are never less than mesmerizing, his ways of creating movement can be by turns enigmatic, exhilarating, and, of late, puzzling. Since 1984, when he formed the Stephen Petronio Company, the dancer-choreographer has been on a singular mission: to lend credence to the notion that, in combination, the intellect and the emotions can create movements that produce a sort of spontaneous combustion--a catharsis designed to extract a certain sexual violence from the dancers and induce shock and rapture in the audience.

Through these and other means Petronio has, in fact, achieved considerable success as both dancer and choreographer. As dancer, first with the Trisha Brown Company (he was its first male performer and danced with the company from 1979 to 1986), later as solo dancer, then as dancer with his own company, Petronio proved entirely charismatic and, for someone who came to dance relatively late, technically brilliant.

During an earlier phase of his career, around the late eighties, Petronio was propelled for the most part by punk-rock music that inspired highly inventive phrasing, partnering, and group imagery. There were surprises everywhere, certainly in such potent works as Simulacrum Reels, Middlesex Gorge, Half Wrong Plus Laytext, and Wrong Wrong--wonderful lifts, strange pauses, sharp contrasting passages, all fascinating to watch.

And there was Michael Clark, the bad boy of British ballet, who came to dance with Petronio and lent his classically trained fluency and precision to a modern dance vocabulary he instantly made his own. Watching Petronio and Clark dance together in female corsets was, as the saying goes, something else.

Those were heady days for Petronio, as far as his public and personal lives were concerned. The irrepressible Clark became something of a catalyst for the company as he melded his sensibilities with those of his friend and colleague. The two seemed to possess an aura that gave the Stephen Petronio Company a creative edge and made it highly viable within the spectrum of postmodern dance. Some four years later, when Clark was no longer dancing with the company, Petronio continued to make off-kilter, passionate, raging dances of over-the-edge sensuality.

Much was expected of Petronio's weeklong season last October at the Joyce Theater in New York City. On paper, his program looked fabulous: the punk-rock aficionado would be setting two of classical music's great war-horses, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, called Full Half Wrong, and Ravel's Bolero (preceded by a recording of Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender"), called The King is Dead (Part 1). Decor would include written text gliding across the stage a la Jenny Holzer, and there would be projections of photographs by artist Cindy Sherman. The inventive designer Manolo would supply the ultrasmart costumes. The program would also include the world premiere of She Says to songs of Yoko Ono. It was all most curiosity-provoking.

But the dance critics were disappointed. "Something was always missing from the three premieres," wrote Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times. And in New York magazine, Tobi Tobias protested, "Petronio's most overt way of cadging a response from his beleaguered audience is to mess around with sexual issues that he presumably hopes will be taboo to them."

Petronio may have been perturbed, but he chooses to ignore his critics. He prefers, instead, to tell of his background, his schooling, his early dancing days, his career, and, most candidly, his personal life.

"I was born in Newark and raised in Nutley, New Jersey," he says. "My father is a truck driver. My mother, now dead, was a housewife. I was raised in a kind of lower-middle-class Italian family. I have all older brother who works for a pharmaceutical firm. We have very different kinds of lives.

"There was really no art in my house, nor music nor painting nor dance. There was television. Well, at a certain point I knew I was kind of different. l knew there was something wanting, but I had no idea what it was.

"A cousin of mine was a dancer. She took me to see a performance right before I left for college. It was Nureyev dancing in Sleeping Beauty. I thought he was incredibly sexy, strong, and organized. As for the plot, it was very foreign to me. I mean, I trusted it; there was some sort of sense to it, and I was really fascinated by that."

He can be said to have found himself in college. Because his family was very poor, he would need a scholarship, especially after he had chosen the most expensive school available--Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was an experimental school that was attached to four other colleges in the Connecticut River Valley-Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke. Fortunately, they gave him a scholarship.