american history
Stephen Petronio (choreographer) American
Landscapes / NYU Skirball, 2019 /
If you don't know the Joyce Theater in New York City, it
is the very center of US dance. It's a theater where all the major dance
companies have and will continue to perform.
For some inexplicable reason (I've never
been there), I regularly receive their e-mails. And I love it. Actually, I
later discovered I had been in that space, when as Ira Joel Haber reminded me
it used to be the Elgin Theater.
Recently, they announced on their
"Joycestream"—a way they can keep in touch with people who love dance
in a time when there are no longer any audiences—they sent me an announcement
of a streaming of choreographer, once the manager for Trisha Brown's company,
Stephen Petronio's dance group for what was to have been their annual Joyce
Theater preview of "American Landscapes," performed by the dancers
Bria Bacon, Taylor Boyland, Ernesto Breton, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, Ryan
Pliss, Nicholas Siscione, Mac Twining, and Megan Wright, along with guest
performers Brandon Collwes and Martha Eddy, danced out their hearts.
I can't say I was particularly impressed
by their dark blue body clothing—women in simple body stockings and men in
high-rise shorts, which did not at all accentuate their supple muscular
mid-body extensions.
But, in a sense, Petronio's choice was
perhaps purposeful. This was a performance not about his dancer's bodies, but
about their constantly shifting relationships—gay, lesbian, and heterosexual
relationships through a long history of time documented through Howard and my
dear friend Robert Longo's artistic relationship, a long friend as well of
Petronio's (he recalls how his $50 charity purchase of one of Longo's
"Women in the City" drawings was one of his very first art purchases,
leaving him to have to absent himself from lunches for a full week) led to a
close friendship.
The images, along with the insistent drive
of the music composed by Jozef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch created, with
Petronio's choreography, a kind of tri-partite structure, despite his intended
abstraction.
The first part, in which the dancers
moved from left to right clearly represented a shift from the East to the West
coast.
In the third section, as the figures moved
through space in the other direction, couples paired-off into gay and lesbian
relationships, which seemed to suggest to me the traumatic shifts that occurred
in New York City in the AIDS epidemic, the horrifying 9/11 events, and, of
course, the impossible to comprehend current virus events.
Yet, even as events got worse, Longo's
images moved to an almost prelapsarian return to nature, even if the images
were a bit blurred and dripping with the blood of the past.
Petronio's
ballet is a profound statement that speaks of our early longings and impossible
failures, including those of our current time. The performance at the New York
Skirball Center
was not only about the American landscape but, in a true sense, about American history itself.
was not only about the American landscape but, in a true sense, about American history itself.
Los Angeles, May 16, 2020
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and
Performance. (May 2020).