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Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
At Jacob's Pillow, the Stephen Petronio Company takes a farewell bow
Advertisement "MiddleSexGorge" by Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025. Jamie Kraus Photography Later in the program, it was 'MiddleSexGorge,' from 1992, Petronio's acclaimed choreographic response to the AIDS crisis. The signature partnering is never a gesture; it is a full surrender of a person's weight into the arms of the company that supports him. The way the dancers touch, lift, and lean on one another becomes a radical display of community. But the dance that hit hardest Sunday afternoon was Petronio's solo, 'Another Kind of Steve,' in which the choreographer rolled his neck and swung his arms through a conversational monologue that celebrated his queerness, lamented the fall of Western civilization, and expressed excitement about vanishing alongside his dances. 'The most delicious thing in the world is to disappear,' Petronio proclaimed, 'and I'm about to get my wish!' Stephen Petronio in "Chair-Pillow" by Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025. Jamie Kraus Photography When a choreographer of Petronio's stature sunsets his company, dance feels more ephemeral than ever. But that is part of the power of dance; that it is fleeting, just like life. Advertisement Petronio decided to close his company partially because he is getting older (age 69, he informed the audience with a wink), but also because the outlook on funding for dance and the arts is more bleak than ever and the full-time company model has become too expensive to maintain. In an interview after the curtain closed, Norton Owen, the Pillow's director of preservation, said there was no better place for the company's final shows — because it's a site that has witnessed the passage of dance history and celebrated it through careful documentation and archival maintenance. 'The fact that they no longer exist as a company doesn't mean that they are now invisible,' he said, referencing the Pillow's archive. 'It just means that there are certain pockets of places where you can find things, and this is going to be one of them.' For former Petronio company dancer turned choreographic assistant Gerald Casel, the archive of Petronio's work lives on in Casel's muscles. 'It's so deeply, kinesthetically, part of my memory of being in the company,' Casel said in an interview just before the final show, 'I still feel so connected to the material I can teach [it] by heart without looking at [a] video.' Casel, a scholar, educator, and accomplished choreographer in his own right, performed with Petronio for 11 (non-consecutive) years beginning in 1991. Since then, he has become a custodian of Petronio's choreography, reconstructing the work for numerous companies and schools across the globe, including the Petronio Company's latest remounting of 'MiddleSexGorge.' Advertisement Stephen Petronio in "Another Kind of Steve" by Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025. Jamie Kraus Photography For Casel, restaging 'MSG' is not just about passing on historic movement patterns to the next generation, 'We have to remind them … what was happening in our culture at the time, the weather around the AIDS epidemic, and refusal of the government to provide research for medication for HIV.' Petronio is deeply situated in American dance history; he studied with Steve Paxton, the founder of contact improv, and made his Pillow debut as the first male dancer with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, in 1980. Petronio exposes Brown's influence in the flop of an arm, and the compositional strategies he employs — establishing a movement phrase that inverts, morphs, fractures, and returns to its original form. With these citations of Brown's legacy, and the inclusion of Rainer's choreography in the closing program, Petronio blows a kiss to the past and prepares for the future. This company may be disbanding, but the choreographer is not retiring. He plans to continue choreographing on a project-by-project basis, and has established a fund to support the work of emerging dance artists in an initiative called, Bloodlines(futures). Casel sat at a picnic table behind the dining hall that feeds the Pillow's artists and staff, and recounted his Sunday morning; 'I gave a warm-up class; Stephen led a roll down.' He recalled rehearsal director Gino Grenek's words to the dancers; 'This is just like every other day. There's the choreography, that's all you need to do.' While it is bittersweet to watch such a highly influential company end its performance career, this is part of the cycle of dance history. There is an ordinariness to it; dance is always ephemeral, companies close — so it goes. Advertisement THE STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY At the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. July 27. Sarah Knight can be reached at sarahknightprojects@
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stephen Petronio Is Disbanding His Dance Company
A little more than 40 years after its founding, the Stephen Petronio Company is disbanding, it announced on Wednesday. The dance troupe will have its final performances at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in July. 'It's been a wild, beautiful ride,' Petronio, 68, said in a phone interview. 'This is the Year of Snake, and it's time to shed what doesn't work anymore and move forward.' What doesn't work anymore, Petronio said, is what he has been doing for decades: sustaining a company of dancers through touring and grants. 'There wasn't enough work for the dancers,' he said. 'The people that had presented us were beginning to disappear, and the funding for those presenters was beginning to shift.' The breakdown of what is sometimes called 'the company model' has been happening for many years, but it was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and, in response to the murder of George Floyd, a displacement of dance funding into social justice projects. 'A lot of company leaders decided this well before I did,' Petronio said. 'I was determined to ride it as long as possible.' When Petronio founded the company in 1984, he did so in a very different cultural environment. The first male member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, he was following a tradition of branching off on his own, extending a lineage. He developed his own movement style: complex and erotic, well-crafted yet unpredictable. (In his 2014 memoir, 'Confessions of a Motion Addict,' he called himself 'a formalist with a dirty mind.') And he became known for collaborations with celebrities from the worlds of art, music and fashion, like Cindy Sherman, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Tara Subkoff/Imitation of Christ. In a 2010 New York Times review of one of his company's 25 seasons at the Joyce Theater, Roslyn Sulcas called Petronio 'one of the few contemporary choreographers to have created an instantly recognizable style and also a substantial oeuvre.' By 2014 Petronio wanted to expand, so he created the Bloodlines project, reviving work by choreographers he saw as his artistic forebears: Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton and others. An offshoot project, Bloodlines (future), supported up-and-coming choreographers. In 2017, the company turned a 175-acre property in the Catskills into the Petronio Residency Center, a place for it and others to rehearse. Then came the pandemic. 'Actually, we weathered the pandemic pretty well,' Petronio said. 'I kept the dancers working.' But he exhausted himself, only to emerge from the pandemic and discover that many foundations had decided to focus on social justice ('which of course I support 100 percent,' he said) instead of supporting companies like his. The troupe ran out of money. Selling the Catskills property in December provided the company with sufficient funds to clear its debt and pay for a few final projects. (The 77-acre nature preserve that the company established with the Doris Duke Foundation will remain untouched.) A valedictory series of performances, bringing back repertory, will culminate at Jacob's Pillow in July. The next project is an extension of Bloodlines (future): around $500,000 to establish a fund to provide young choreographers with financial support. The company is also creating a digital archive of Petronio's work, hoping other companies will want to license it. Petronio himself is not done. 'I'm not retiring,' he said. 'I'm looking forward to figuring out another way to continue making work.' 'I always think I'm invincible,' he added. 'I always think, 'I can pull this off,' and I always have. But the world changed.'
