STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY
The dances’ actual movement images, even the most mundane and gestural ones, affect the viewer without his consciously perceiving them. Petronio alternately collapses and explodes our sense of time: clear and emphatic unison sections may last only five or six counts; a solo passage featuring the movement of one finger on one raised hand may take several minutes. Petronio’s movement vocabulary is entirely idiosyncratic: these steps, jumps, lifts, and turns aren’t in any of our dance lexicons–not in ballet, not in modern, not in social-dance forms, not even in the multitude of postmodern vocabularies derived from pedestrian and natural movement. With no familiar vocabulary, no narrative framework, and all our usual notions of temporality shot to hell, we lack the perceptual tools to make watching these dances a conscious experience.
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Surrender II, a duet for Frey Faust and Jeremy Nelson created for an April ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) benefit in New York, is an effortful, abstract, and evocative dance. Surrender is primarily about the possibilities of dance: the ways a dancer transfers weight from one limb to another, the ways two dancers can shift their combined weight from one to the other, the ways movement can be initiated, the contrasts between supported, solo, and shared balances. Some of the possibilities are smooth, some beautiful, some dangerous, and others ungainly: Surrender is all that and more.
All seven members of the company–Faust, Nelson, Petronio, Kristen Borg, Susan Braham, Rebecca Hilton, and Mia Lawrence–are strong, supple, and surprising dancers. They have seven distinct body types, seven distinct personalities, even seven distinct ways of presenting the same movement material. Petronio’s choreography incorporates such short, quick bits of unison movement that we never have the opportunity to see them as an ensemble, yet each dances with an absolute awareness of the other six, constantly shifting to accommodate the others. They can catch one another in mid-leap, arrest each other’s falls at the last skull-threatening second, and never lose the tensionless quality that characterizes even Petronio’s riskiest choreography.
Walk-In begins with Susan Braham standing in a dimly lit corner of the stage. Justin Terzi’s black-and-white painted drops are ambiguous, larger than life: a face that might be Mao, a twisting nude reminiscent of Rodin’s bronzes, a ladder. The initial movement is focused, almost minimalist: a creeping turn of the head; slow, straight arms driving flexed wrists; a series of movements for one peculiarly articulated fourth finger. Braham’s extended arms conspire with the soft lighting and the score’s rippling electronic glissandi to create the impression of falling, drifting, sinking. The brightly lit second solo, Petronio’s own, juxtaposes slow, symmetrical arm movements with fast-footed jumps, kicks, and changes of direction; in a fraction of a second a leg rotates from full turnout to a torturous turn-in.
AnAmnesia is slower than Petronio’s other dances and allows us to see the contrasts between different tempi and levels of energy more readily. He builds much of AnAmnesia around passing dance phrases from one dancer to another across the performance space; each dancer picks up precisely where the other left off, mid-gesture, even mid-leap. Ripples of movement guide the viewer’s eye through the dance. Petronio also plays with rhythmic complexity–the way the touch of a toe syncopates the rhythm of the following step, for example–rather than with relentless speed and density. The dance phrases themselves are longer, the stillnesses more telling, the dance more carefully focused and approachable.
