“#3,” “MiddleSexGorge,” “Love Me Tender,” “Foreign Import,” and “Ghostown”
Stephen Petronio Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
New York
April 27, 2010
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Stephen Petronio—now wrapping up his company’s 25th anniversary season with a week of performances at the Joyce—is utterly indifferent to the sober, lo-fi aesthetic of the more earnest precincts of post-post art. He’s often labeled a “downtown” choreographer, but his downtown is as much that of storied dance clubs and protest theater as it is of raw loft space. Not that his style looks anything like club dancing. In “MiddleSexGorge,” one of the vintage works on the program, it looks like the adorably bratty love child of Trisha Brown and William Forsythe talking smack. But its trappings—music and costumes by “it” bands and edgy designers—are the apotheosis of club theater: the brash art of arriving at the right party in the right clothes with a bevy of fabulous friends in tow.
But as his Joyce program demonstrates, something totally of its moment can nonetheless wear well decades later. (It’s a tribute to Petronio’s taste that many of his collaborators retain their cachet, or at least a cult following, twenty years on.) “MiddleSexGorge” hardly seems outré anymore—if it ever really did—but it’s still an eyeful and still worth watching. The men burst onto the stage clad only in H. Petal’s famous pink–trimmed corsets and dance belts, just as they did in 1990, but their costumes seemed more a knowing, complicit wink than an in–your–face snarl. The sabre-legged women—dressed in black leotards like an invading army from the kingdom of Agon—were much scarier.
Petronio has stated that the genesis of “MiddleSexGorge” was his forcible arrest at an ACT UP protest, but you don’t need to know that or anything about late 80’s AIDS activism to make sense of the work. One of its recurring images—that of dancers grabbed by their limbs and roughly manipulated—has resonances beyond being hauled away by the police. It evokes Orpheus being torn asunder by the Bacchantes. It also evokes Balanchine’s “tall girls”—from “Rubies” say, or “Four Temperaments”—seized hand and foot by men vainly hoping to get them under control. There’s little doubt that we were meant to think of Balanchine: one of the women replicated Cartier-Bresson’s iconic 1959 photo of Balanchine demonstrating a tendu not once, but twice.
Petronio mines ballet’s vocabulary—you can name the steps—but he uses it to ends defiantly un–balletic. Every bit of effort is there to see. Weight isn’t transferred so much as flung out in pursuit of a limb that’s taken off in some unforeseen direction. Battements are opportunities to reload for turns. Sautés erupt terrier–like from stiff legs and inelastic feet. It all happens at top speed, but it’s curiously inert: energy is neither directed up and out, as in ballet, nor coursed through the body in a wave, as in Brown. At the individual level, it’s blocked, displaced, or stopped dead.
It’s in his meticulous use of groups and stage space that Petronio’s style becomes responsive to the music and fully expressive. Look at a single dancer, and you’ll see the same dead–end phrase over and over again; look at his ever–shifting groups, however, and you’ll see supple, exhilirating currents of energy pouring across the stage.
The groups in “MiddleSexGorge” often moved in sharp, oppositional thrusts in keeping with the jagged synth beats of the score (a 20 minute remix of Wire’s “Ambitious”). Two women did a dance that was half go-go girl, half robot; as a solo it wouldn’t look like much, doubled it looked like danger. The groups in “Ghostown,” a brand new work set to an eerie, swoony piece for strings1 by Radiohead’s lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, swirled on to the stage from the wings with each swell of the music, washing like waves around a mysterious woman shrouded in white (Mandy Kirschner).
Greenwood inserted a driving pizzicato about two-thirds of the way into the work, and a less deft choreographer might have seen it as an opportunity to set a mass of dancers going in lockstep motion. Petronio elected to use it for a fierce solo for a woman in sleek black (Amanda Wells) miming scissor snips with her fingers. (Was she one of the Fates?) He framed her with three motionless dancers: one standing, one sitting, one laying prone. Eerie “Ghostown” doesn’t have the immediacy of “MiddleSexGorge”—the dancers seem turned away from us much of the time—but the fluency with which they spill wraithlike across the stage will reward a second look.
“Foreign Import,” set to Radiohead’s hit “Creep,” is a trio extracted from a larger work choreographed in 2007 for The Scottish Ballet. Its group dynamics recapitulated the song’s lyrics: two women draped in gauzy white (Shila Tirabassi and Amanda Wells) drifted around the stage like uncaring angels while a man in black shorts (Reed Luplau) fllung himself in their path in a vain attempt to win their regard. It was presented as a lead–in to “Ghostown,” but the only real connection between the two works seemed to be Greenwood and the hint of pitiless supernatural beings.
Each half of the program opened with a solo. “Love Me Tender,” set to Elvis Presley, was a pretty trifle, danced by Julian De Leon in a sparkly shirt, a Marilynesque pout, and little else. More substantial was the program opener, “#3,.” choreographed in 1986 and danced by Petronio himself. It began with a tease: after the house lights went down, we sat listening to the swanky wail of Lenny Pickett and the Borneo Horns for many long, anticipatory minutes before a spot picked Petronio out of the darkness. He stood alone on stage, dressed in a tuxedo shirt, pants, and cummerbund, his grey bow-tie loosened and his suspenders hanging down from his waist, as if we’d caught him in a moment of intimate transition—just in from a night on the town perhaps, or getting ready to go out.
Rooted in fourth-position, he channeled the ghosts of theater past: an actress pulling off her wig, a chanteuse running her hands over her body, a diva gazing heavenward like a martyred saint. Sometimes his gestures uncoiled like silk off a spindle; sometimes they shuddered forth in spasms. Were we being shown a man in ecstasy or in torment? Either way, he looked increasingly vulnerable and exposed. Were these the confessions of someone who could only speak in icons or the end product of a culture in thrall to its images? The final gesture—a fond, narcissus-like gaze into a mimed hand mirror—suggested both.
1 "Popcorn Superhet Receiver": the work's U.S. premiere, performed by the Wordless Music Orchestra, is available for streaming at WNYC.org.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Yi-Chun Wu
Top: Mandy Kirschner, Barrington Hinds, Julian De Leon, Gino Grenek, and
Emily Stone in "Ghostown"
Bottom: Barrington Hinds and Mandy Kirschner in “Ghostown”
