#Stephen Petronio Company

[dance-world]

Nick Sciscione - Stephen Petronio Company - photo by Zach Hilty 

[books0977]

Cori Kresge and Emily Stone in Glacial Decoy, Stephen Petronio Company, March 2016. © Yi-Chun Wu.

Glacial begins with two dancers swirling in and out of the wings, never beginning, never ending, never reaching the center of the stage. The infinite is here. Their limbs look like dead weights swinging pendulously away from their center. Brown’s calculations are precision personified. The two bodies, so far apart, so individually busy – you can hear them breathing – create their own hypnotic rhythm.

[larryland]

2018 Season Announced for Catskill’s Bridge Street Theatre

Catskill’s Bridge Street Theatre is delighted to announce its 2018 line-up of plays –  five magnificent and deeply human stories for audiences to savor between March and November. Currently scheduled for BST’s third Mainstage Subscription Season are: FRANKIE & JOHNNY IN THE CLAIRE DE LUNE by Terrence McNally (March 29-April 8) A contemporary American classic and (with the possible exception of…

[wyszniewski]

New Yorkers will have two chances to reassess the choreographer’s influence, first within a program of Stephen Petronio’s “Bloodlines.”

[jennaschererwrites]

Stephen Petronio Company comes to Round Top | Watershed Post

Stephen Petronio Company has been operating out of New York City since 1984, performing dance pieces across the world and collaborating with a vast array of musicians, artists and designers, from Lou Reed and Rufus Wainwright to Cindy Sherman and Anish Kapoor.

In the waning days of 2016, the venerated choreographer made a major move to secure his company's legacy in the dance world, purchasing Crows Nest, a 175-acre property in Round Top. Surrounded by state forest on three sides, Crows Nest will provide a home for Petronio's newly minted Residency Initiative.

The company began fundraising efforts for a permanent space in January of last year. A longtime Putnam County resident, Petronio hadn't originally thought to look in the Catskills for a location, worrying it would be too far from the city. But then Adrienne Willis, the executive director the American Dance Institute, encouraged him to look into spaces on the west side of the Hudson near Lumberyard, the ADI's future home in the town of Catskill.

When Petronio visited Crows Nest, which encompasses two buildings built in 2003 and a 19th-century caretaker's cottage, he knew he'd found the right spot. "Once you see Crows Nest, there's no turning back. It's such an amazingly beautiful place," the choreographer says. "I could not believe my luck. I saw it this summer the first day that it came on the market, and I made an offer the third day. I knew when I saw it that this was everything we had dreamed about."

The company purchased the property for $1.3 million. Petronio plans to begin the residency program in mid-2018, providing two-week stints for up-and-coming dance troupes throughout the summer. In addition to providing rehearsal space and lodging, the program will also pay the artists for their time — a practice Petronio says is unfortunately rare among dance residencies.

"Dancers get very little in their lives, and it's all very ephemeral. So my criteria was that when the dancers pull up [to Crows Nest], I want them to feel like they've died and gone to heaven for a few weeks," he explains. “It’s an isolated place just to get lost and begin to develop ideas without a requirement.”

Though public performances won't take place at Crows Nest, Petronio hopes to bring finished pieces by his company and others to performances venues in the surrounding area — including at Lumberyard, which is also slated to open in 2018. He'd eventually like to collaborate with other dance organizations in the Catskills and beyond to provide burgeoning artists with as many resources as possible.

“There's a group of us from Jacob's Pillow [in the Berkshires] all way over to Round Top that have similar interests in terms of preserving the creative space for dancers,” Petronio says. “For me to give an artist two weeks is great, but if I could link arms with four or five other residency programs and give them experience at various programs throughout the summer, they may have a running start at making a new work.”

As for his own eight-person company, Petronio plans to continue to develop and produce new works in Manhattan. The troupe will begin its third season of “Bloodlines,” an ongoing exploration of postmodern dance masterworks, in March. But once Crows Nest is up and running, he plans to bring his dancers there for residencies a few weeks per year. In the meantime, Petronio and his husband will move into the gatehouse on the property.

Between running both the company and the Residency Initiative — not to mention getting better acquainted with Crows Nest and the surrounding community — it’s a lot to take on. But for Petronio, there’s nothing more important than creating a place where burgeoning choreographers and dancers can have the space, time and resources to work on their art.

“The thing that really is precious to me in my life is the act of going into the studio with a bunch of young bodies and engaging in the creative process,” he says. “In terms of an eventual legacy, I wanted to leave a place where people can really research and develop new dances. That felt like the biggest gift that I could give to the field.”

[tsaccenti]

CLAMS CASINO – “HEALING” :60 Trailer

Director: Tim Saccenti @timsaccenti

DOP: Luke McCoubrey

Editor : Matt Posey for PS260

Colourist: Ed Koenig for MPC

Choreography:Stephen Petronio/Stephen Petronio Company.

Dancers: Bria Bacon, Jaqi Medlock, Tess Montoya, Megan Wright

AC: Matt Henderson @melo55 Gaffer: Rusty Bennett @rustin.peace Key Grip: Tom Sarvello @blackcoffee_ftw Swing: Daniela Berg @invoice_sent

Thanks to Ben Gaffin, Radical media, Steven Graf, Chemistry Creative, MPC NYC

[nmds5008k]

Dance is a non-verbal language. Using music with lyrics pushes the meaning of the movement in specific directions. As someone who has worked with dance artists as a producer and journalist for decades, this has always been one of the things I have always treasured about the art form. Choreographers often work with a variety of scores while they are making their dances, and either commission scores, or settle on pieces later in the process. Of course, like all of us, there are also those who find a piece of music or other sound score, and are compelled to bring it to life in movement, in visuals, in a sequence of images.

see also: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NlyAUbM_lw

[wazafam]

By BY GIA KOURLAS from Arts in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/arts/dance/stephen-petronio-company-review.html?partner=IFTTT Stephen Petronio’s virtual program, presented by the Joyce Theater, explores isolation, longing and legacy, but doesn’t take those issues to a deeper place. Review: A Choreographer Looks Back on His Pandemic Year New York Times

[dance-world]

Nick Sciscione - Stephen Petronio Company  

[wyszniewski]

Stephen Petronio’s farmhouse is his private museum, with a focus on works from 1950 onward.

[healingtheblackbody]

Spell Artist: Orlando Zane Hunter

Orlando Zane Hunter Jr. is an international artist and healer who creates from a Black womanist framework. Hunter is a co-founder of the collective Brother(hood) Dance! and a 2015/16 Dancing While Black Fellow. In their work, Hunter tackles issues resulting from a white supremacist system. She grew up dancing hip-hop and graduated with a BFA in Dance from Univ. of Minnesota where he acquired movement vocabularies such as Afro-Brazilian, West-African Guinea, and Contemporary Yorchha, a mix of yoga, a martial art form called Chhau, and Oddissi. While attending he performed works by Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, Carl Flink, Louis Falco, Colleen Thomas, Uri Sands, Stephen Petronio and Nora Chipaumire. His solo “Mutiny” was selected to represent the University of Minnesota at the 2011 ACDFA gala in Madison, Wisconsin.In 2014  he co-choreographed “Redbone: A Biomythography” that debuted at the Nuyorican Café, Wild Project Theater, Duke University: Women’s center, and Flight deck theater in Oakland, CA. Hunter studied GLBT activism and history in Amsterdam and Berlin. He has performed with Christal Brown/INspirit Dance Company, Contempo Physical Dance, Forces of Nature, Germaul Barnes, Andre Zachary/ Renegade Performance Group, Makeda Thomas, Erick Montes/ Danceable Projects, Threads Dance Project, TU Dance and Ananya Dance Theater, an all women of color company where they were the first male bodied member and toured with them to Trinidad & Tobago and Zimbabwe.

[tsaccenti]

CLAMS CASINO – “HEALING”

Director: Tim Saccenti @timsaccenti Production: Setta Studio @setta_studio DOP: Luke McCoubrey Editor : Matt Posey for PS260 Choreography:Stephen Petronio/Stephen Petronio Company. Dancers: Bria Bacon, Jaqi Medlock, Tess Montoya, Megan Wright AC: Matt Henderson @melo55 Gaffer: Rusty Bennett @rustin.peace Key Grip: Tom Sarvello @blackcoffee_ftw Swing: Daniela Berg @invoice_sent Thanks to Ben Gaffin, Steven Graf, Chemistry Creative, MPC NYC

[danseaujourdhui]

Nicholas Sciscione, a member of the Stephen Petronio Company, in Steve Paxton’s “Excerpt From Goldberg Variations” at the Joyce Theater.

[blacktiemagazine]

http://blacktiemagazine.com/-save_the_date_2020/Fire_island_dance_festival.htm Virtual Fire Island Dance Festival, July 17. World premieres by modern tap dancer Ayodele Casel, one of The New York Times’ “Biggest Breakout Stars of 2019”; KEIGWIN + COMPANY Artistic Director Larry Kiegwin; and Stephen Petronio, artistic director of Stephen Petronio Company. The stream also will feature past festival performances by Emmy Award nominee Al Blackstone; MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Kyle Abraham and acclaimed dancer  and choreographer Garrett Smith. #dradance

[theidi0syncratic]

We the interns with the Prosecco 🥂 don’t judge us 💁🏻‍♂️ . . . #internship #justkidding #photography #bringbackthe80s #sassy #asianboy (at Stephen Petronio Dance Company) https://www.instagram.com/p/B8fjsH2h91v/?igshid=1i8rmmw46dqbf

[stephenpetroniocompany]

TREAD  by Bonnie Brooks 

part of a series of essays on the Bloodlines Project 

Merce Cunningham’s titles usually came pretty late in his choreographic process—or at least that’s most often when he would reveal what he was calling a new dance. His titles frequently offer multiple readings (CRWDSPCR, or XOVER), sometimes refer to nature (Pond Way, RainForest, Summerspace, Beach Birds), and may appear to be literal (How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run; Duets, Nearly Ninety). The titles were invitations, clues, and sometimes nods to information or backstory to which his audiences did not always have immediate access (Second Hand).

In this revival by Stephen Petronio Company of Cunningham’s 1970 work Tread, we have one of Merce’s more playful and mischievous choreographic projects. “Tread” is both a noun (a surface marking, the sound or manner of someone walking, the part of a tire that meets the road) and a verb (to walk in a specified way, such as “tread with care,” or keeping oneself upright but not traveling in water). The many possible readings of “tread” invoke a wink at the audience and the perpetual Cunningham invitation to his viewer to figure out or determine for themselves out just what might be going on here.

This is the third of Stephen Petronio Company’s Cunningham revivals, anchoring the company’s now-five-year old Bloodlines project. An initiative that honors the lineage of American postmodern dance masters, Petronio began his curation of Bloodlines in 2014 with Merce Cunningham’s iconic RainForest, originally performed on Cunningham’s own company in 1968. Since then, additional works by seminal dance postmodernists have been added to the Petronio repertory, including Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, an excerpt from Steve Paxton’s Goldberg Variations, Rudy Perez’s Coverage, Anna Halprin’s The Courtesan and the Crone, and Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A with Flags. More is coming. The project is Stephen Petronio’s grand experiment to create new material and clearly frame the legacy of his own distinguished body of work. In the process, he expands the range, capacity, and scope of his repertory by calling on his dancers to learn and perform works from dance’s experimental past.

With Tread, Stephen Petronio Company acquired a work that Cunningham Trust restager—and former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member—Jennifer Goggans says is a great match for Petronio’s dancers. “There’s a looseness and drive in the movement, a looseness in the torso and arms, that matches well with what the Petronio dancers do. They have the necessary technique but also know how to let it go.” The two previous works secured for Bloodlines, RainForest and Signals, are spare and primarily deploy solos, duets and trios.  Tread, Goggans notes, “is very much a group dance…playful, showing Merce’s sense of humor, loaded with complex tempos, offering a lot of release as the movement has such a free quality.” She added that in researching the work in preparation for the revival, “We found a film documentation of it, and it’s one of the few films of Merce’s work where almost all of the dancers were smiling the entire time, including Merce.”

Revival of any dance is always a complex process that depends on a host of resources ranging from choreographers’ (if available) and dancers’ (if available) memories to film/video/photo documentation if available, formal notation if it was done (Cunningham’s works were not notated in the traditional manner), references to notes of any kind, and any other resources that might help strengthen and clarify the action and content of a given work. When the decision was made to disband the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—to take place after Cunningham’s death (in 2009) and after an international, two-year tour to say thank you and goodbye (2010-2011)—work began to secure Cunningham’s legacy through his Trust. That work included the creation of “dance capsules” documenting all known assets of as many of his completed repertory works as possible. There are presently 86 digital dance capsules held by the Merce Cunningham Trust. The capsules are an ongoing resource for certified Cunningham restagers as well as scholars, writers, and historians whose initiatives sustain the Cunningham legacy and keep the work available to audiences around the globe.

Goggans spent a great deal of time combing through the Tread assets to broaden her knowledge of the dance before entering the studio with the Petronio dancers. “Sandra Neel, another former Cunningham Company dancer, who performed in Tread when it premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music in January, 1970, had done a workshop on Tread in 2008. One result of that workshop was a duet from Tread being added to the material that the company used in Events.” (Cunningham showed his work in two ways: repertory concerts of completed works, and Events that assembled excerpts from various dances into a new, timed configuration of material for performance, often in unusual or non-traditional spaces that were not suitable to repertory presentations).  

“Staring at a black and white, fuzzy video requires patience and a certain eye,” Goggans says.  “We also looked at contact sheets of photos taken by Jim Klosty. Those contact sheets had been a resource Sandra used in preparing for her workshop. We kept finding new bits of information. In combing through David Vaughan’s book, Merce Cunningham: 50 Years, I discovered a Tread photo of one of the poses in the work. Mel Wong was under everyone and crawls under the group and pokes out from under them. I never would have known that without the photo.”  

Bringing the work to the studio with Stephen Petronio’s dancers in autumn, 2018 was an opportunity for Goggans to engage with people who in many cases had taken her Cunningham classes at City Center and in some cases had participated in workshop settings on other Cunningham dances. “It made the job easier,” she said. “We weren’t starting from scratch in terms of Merce’s work. It was a pleasure, working with them. They’ve held onto the material, they’ve let it settle in their bodies, they know the piece inside and out. If there’s a problem, they know how to keep going.”

In watching Tread, with its complex entries and exits, changes in tempo, group poses and sly duets, physical entanglements and disentanglements, and sense of frolicking play, one can see the need to for the dancers to know the piece inside and out. The work is pragmatically structured (the dancers begin and end the dance casually seated on the floor, much action ensues in between) and has a working warehouse ambience, in part thanks to Christian Wolff’s score, and in part to the Bruce Nauman décor featuring ten industrial fans set across the front of the stage, all running, every other fan blowing the air from a stationary or oscillating setting.  The juxtaposition of startling and unpredictable sounds with the playful nature of the choreography is vintage Cunningham—make of it what you will, disparate things collide all the time in life, and we adjust ourselves to collisions of content and experience as needed. In this dance, Merce seems to be saying, “we’re all in this together, let’s have some fun.”

Stephen Petronio’s own connection to Tread, which came right around the time he was starting to dance, was an iconic photo of the dancers with Nauman’s fans. “As a young guy, I made certain associations with art, and that photo was fundamental to my understanding of that time in history, or at least my projection of it. When the Trust suggested Tread for our next Cunningham work, the Nauman décor and the word ‘playful’ were golden keys for me.” He added that by focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s in choosing the works to restage, “we could focus on a time in history when game and social structures were being looked at in a new way as material for dance. Merce used chance in his search for choreographic structures and movement. Others deployed other sources. One of the things that resonates in Tread is the complexity of the group communal activity. It’s one of the reasons this work is so perfect for my company. There’s always a group architecture that I’m interested in. In watching the piece grow, I’ve seen the dancers dial into that sensibility, using their communal radar and having to hone it into the Cunningham language. It’s a wonderful challenge. Tread is incredibly honed and spare, yet the delivery of the information is throughout the space. Perfect efficiency. Merce made the stage look sophisticated and casual at the same time. We’re so thrilled to learn it, invite the audience into it, and show viewers a side of Merce that they haven’t, in recent memory, seen.”  

One of the differences between the Cunningham revivals and most of the other works incorporated into Bloodlines, Petronio noted, is that Merce is not here. “To get at the elusive nature of the artist’s mind and intention, and how that gets utilized, is a daunting task. We’re learning there is no right answer or set way to do things when it comes to restaging. What continues in this project is a spirit of interest in trying various ways of getting into those minds and intentions. Every artist we have worked with wants something different. We have to be adaptable. And we’re learning so much from the process and the works.”    

Bringing this revival of Tread to audiences in New York City and beyond is the latest gift of the Bloodlines project—and from Stephen Petronio and the Merce Cunningham Trust—to dance aficionados. Many dance watchers today have never seen this delightful piece from Cunningham’s vast body of work. To see it now is both to encounter the legacy of Merce’s genius and also to be drawn into the fleeting pleasure of watching dancers skitter across a stage, engage in complicated ways with one another, pile up, stop and pose, disassemble, and resume activity. As ever, and absent any revealed narrative, Cunningham created ways for us to see our own lives flashing before us on the stage. In this case, with a grin.  

Photo of Nicholas Sciscione of SPC in Tread by Merce Cunningham. Photo by Ian Douglas.