Stephen Petronio Company

…they fall into embraces, assist one another, make gestures that hint at emotions. But always they dance, as if their lives depended on it, as if even while connections sever and structures spin apart, this world’s fragments carry the DNA of wholeness. - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

Acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, Stephen Petronio is widely regarded as one of the leading dance-makers of his generation. New music, visual art and fashion collide in his dances producing powerfully modern landscapes for the senses.

Founded in 1984, Stephen Petronio Company has performed in 26 countries throughout the world, including over 35 New York City engagements with 15 seasons at The Joyce Theater. The Company has been commissioned by Dance Umbrella Festival/London, Hebbel Theater/Berlin, Theater Scene National de Sceaux/France, Festival d’Automne a Paris, CNDC Angers/France, The Holland Festival, Festival International Montpellier-Danse, Danceworks UK Ltd, International Cannes Danse Festival, and in the US by San Francisco Performances, The Joyce Theater, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, and White Bird, among others.

His newest work, The Architecture of Loss, reaches out for inspiration all the way to the Faroe Islands, that Danish territory between Scotland and Iceland where the cultural inspiration is Nordic and hand knitting is a traditional craft. The open and webby designs of fashion designers Guðrun & Guðrun, using locally-made Faroese fabrics, will help create a visual motif for a dance that captures the experience of loss.

The title of this piece has been "in his life" for a long time; in the 90's he began to refer to it as the heartbeat of his work.  But what's its shape? It defies conventional expectations. People who know Stephen Petronio Company will attest: there are few occurrences of stillness or spaces in his dances. As things appear, they disappear. That, Petronio maintains, is what's peculiar and special about dance. He focuses on emotional and architectural elements that develop, form, then slip away.

To physicalize loss is an interesting and challenging task. Petronio draws on figurative sources, but does not use them literally. In a recent trip to Mexico, he was struck by Mayan pottery and architectural figures. His fascination was not purely the shapes themselves, but the fact that they were evocative of a state of mind.

From that was born (or codified) a process named "ethersketch," an energy painting in space, a way to use the body and its limbs to mark and define the sphere, in which a body moves.  An evolving concept , it applies as much to contemporary urban life as it does to remnants of classical civilizations. The principle is that you can take the consciousness of a source and draw with it in space, reconstituting it in a dancer's body. The magic is that the source figure is lost.

Back to the designs of Guðrun & Guðrun: Petronio says, There is something Gothic and sad about the web of their fabrics.   The gossamer feeling of their locally grown and hand knit Faroese designs suggest the fragile spirit he envisions, and will be an important addition to the piece.  So will the music of Valgeir Sigurðsson, one of Iceland's most prolific mixer/composers and founder of the Bedroom Community record label. His score,  with additions by New York composer Nico Muhly, will be of an electronic mixed genre, ranging from fabricated electronics to beautiful live acoustic strings. The image, says Petronio, will be of a thick, industrial surface with beautiful acoustic moments bursting through it.

Six men and six women will perform a multi layered event with a visual design by long time collaborator Ken Tabachnik who uses the artwork of Faroese painter Rannva Kunnoy in a triptych projection system as the source to create a haunting visual world.  

Following the debut at the Joyce Theater, March 6-11, 2012, the piece will tour to Oslo, Reykjavik, and the Faroe Islands. In that engagement, it will be paired with Petronio's City of Twist (2002), a collaboration with artist/composer Laurie Anderson and fashion provocateur Tara Subkoff.

City of Twist addresses loss differently. It's a series of archetypal urban portraits of resilient New Yorkers and a love letter to them in the aftermath of 9/11. It's a choreography of aggression and vulnerability, celebrating New York's highly-strung, shifting course of life, with shock in its nerves and expansive humanity in its heart. The work was begun before the attacks of 9/11 but was, inevitably, influenced by them.

The repertory offered also includes a restaging of his extraordinary evening-length work, Underland, which was awarded an NEA American Masterpieces grant and was originally created for the Sydney Dance Company in 2002. It presents a dark and brooding world inspired by the tender, bitter-sweet songs of pop balladeer Nick Cave, with dancers hurling through space with razor sharp precision; fiercely energized one moment, sensually lyrical the next.