It Ends Like This

Stephen Petronio has an odd way of celebrating his 40^th anniversary. He and his board have decided this season will be the company’s last. “A lot of our funding sources dried up at the end of pandemic,” he says. “A lot came at us during the pandemic, and when it was over money started going to places that weren’t Stephen Petronio. It got drastic very quickly.” As part of the closure, the organization also sold the Petronio Residency Center, in the Catskill Mountains, that since 2017 has provided rare and essential space for dance artists to create.

Stephen Petronio. Photograph by Sarah Silver

On an afternoon in May, Petronio opened rehearsal doors for an informal showing as the company prepared for its final performances, July 23–27, at Jacob’s Pillow. As we removed our shoes to find a seat along the mirrored studio wall, the dancers marked phrases in twos and threes along the edges of the room. With shaved head framed by signature thick black eyeglasses, a stack of bracelets circling his left wrist, Petronio in person is striking and affable. He introduced excerpts from four works recently dusted off from an archive that boasts roughly 80 titles. He explained the social context for each and dished on his collaborations with the famous composers, including Rufus Wainwright (the music was late), Laurie Anderson (she invited him to her studio for several sessions to sample various effects), and Michael Nyman (quite a departure in style).

A week later, Fjord Review caught an hour of rehearsal (week 10 of a 16-week rehearsal season) and met with Petronio about his plans for the future. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’m surprised by how upbeat you all seem. I would think there would be a little pathos about this being the last season. Can you talk about how you’re feeling as you approach this final performance at Jacob’s Pillow?

I’m gonna start crying immediately. When I decided it would be the final season, that was a very difficult and sad decision. It just felt like this was the time to close for many, many reasons. It took me awhile to work through that. And then we sold the retreat upstate. After the pandemic ended, everything began to spiral and we had gotten so big that we couldn’t really recover. The company had gone from Stephen Petronio’s work—presenting it and producing and touring it—to Stephen Petronio with Bloodlines, giving kudos to the masters that inspired me, to then having a retreat. It all got bigger and bigger. You know I’m Italian—I want lots of food at the table. And then the pandemic struck. And I thought, “Well, we’ll make it through,” and we did. But afterward, there was a very big shrinkage in touring: presenters were closing.

I remember being so impressed about how hard you worked to keep your dancers healthy and connected during Covid. The Residency Center was an essential space at that time.

It was one of the only places where you could work. It wasn’t just about my dancers, other people were coming up, too. The residency was all about giving that creative space without any expectation and no deliverables. I borrowed a lot of money to do that. During the pandemic my instinct was to keep my feet moving. We had classes going, I was teaching on Zoom, I was making work on Zoom, I had residencies. And when it was over I realized that I was exhausted. We decided to close. There was a lot of trauma. Once the property sold—and it took a year and a half—there was enough money to do what we really wanted to do in wrapping things up.

Michael Badger and Gino Grenek in “Bud.” Photograph by Sarah Silver

What is it that you really want to do?

First and foremost I wanted to have a full 16-week rehearsal season with the company, bringing back as many works as we can. So the dancers got 16 weeks at a very decent salary, five days a week, 5 hours a day. Jacobs Pillow was so kind to invite me to do a final season there. For me it was really about going back and embodying as many of the works as we could, whether we were going to perform them at Jacob’s Pillow or not. I wanted to show them for free with free classes in Manhattan, just to say, “This is us. We’re here. It’s gonna end on our terms, and we’re gonna show you what we’ve done.”

The other thing is I wanted to do a digital archive of the company. We’ve already started it.

The third thing is I want to take a pot of money in the half-a-million dollar range and dedicate it to young artists. What makes me happiest is to be in the studio barefoot with a bunch of crazy people doing insane things. It’s why I founded that retreat. I wanted to give a substantial part of what the sale produced to a fund that would support young creative endeavors. We’re in the process of figuring out what that’s gonna be.

What were you thinking about as you selected work for the Jacob’s Pillow program?

“MiddleSexGorge” had to happen—I imagine that’ll be on my tombstone. That’s really where I began to broker the language of sexual empowerment in the movement. A lot of the movement is built so that the tailbone and the pubic bone are out of alignment. I took vertical alignment and pushed the pelvis forward. There’s a lot of hip and head circles, that kind of ecstasy. And there’s a lot of violence—people are getting thrown around. Empowerment and loss of power was a big issue for me during that period.

I had a long and beautiful career collaborating with visual artists and the last one was Robert Longo. I wanted to show “American Landscapes” for that reason.

My work is a journal of the moment we’re living through. “MiddleSexGorge” was about ACT UP and the AIDs crisis; “Broken Man” was post 9/11; and “American Landscapes” was post-Trump.

Not so much an illustration, but those things make us feel a certain way when we’re working.

Then I’m doing a solo, called “Another Kind of Steve” just because I couldn’t resist having the last word. I stopped working on solo stuff years ago, but when the company was off last year, I made it my business to go into the studio every day for a couple of hours and just improvise. It was fun. And my body was not, like, killing me so that was … you know, I’m 69. It comes back in different ways as you get older. All the connections are still there—maybe it’s not as big as it was or as high as it was, but that kind of continuum is in my body forever.

“Broken Man” is a solo that you made on yourself. I understand you’re going to have different dancers perform it on different nights. I couldn’t help but notice Tess Montoya as you all were rehearsing this today.

The six dancers that have been with the company the longest will each get one night. Once I knew I was going to do “Broken Man,” I thought, “I’ll teach that, it’ll be easy. It will be fun.” So suddenly, I was learning the movement back in front of these kids, looking in the mirror at 69. It was not fun. I had a breakdown. So I asked Tess if she would come into the studio and research it with me. We go in every day and learn a little bit together and we teach them.

Taylor Boyland, Mac Twining, Tess Montoya in Stephen Petronio's “American Landscapes.” Photograph by Sarah Silver

Oh, that’s how she had it so deeply in her body. You mentioned last week at rehearsal that you could see Ashleigh Leite, the original cast member, for a solo Taylor Massa was performing. Is that bittersweet?

No, it’s beautiful because they’re still with me. When I see Jeremy Nelson, or Ashleigh Leite or Kristen Borg—I still see Trisha [Brown] in my body. Every once in a while she comes out and it’s “Hey, how are you?” It’s a beautiful thing. Time collapses in movement, or it expands. You can look at it either way.

I did a very cheeky thing—I asked the dancers to go into the video archive and “Choose what you want.” Taylor chose Ashleigh’s solo from “City of Twist.” She happens to look like Ashleigh, she has the same body as Ashleigh, and she’s as mean a dancer as Ashleigh. I mean “mean” in the best possible way. Liv [England] is always saying, “I wish there was something slower.” She’s much more luxurious than my natural inclination. Jimena Paz had a very sensual solo in “City of Twist” that Liv chose and she did it beautifully. Larissa [Acebedo] and Nick [Sciscione] chose the unison duet from “Strange Attractors.” When those two brought back that duet I realized that I was making very blunt punched movement at the beginning of my career. That toughness was something I really wanted to see onstage because there’s a lot of grace in the world and that’s not me. When I began working to the Michael Nyman music, it really encouraged me to reach out into space in a lengthened, more luxurious way. So watching that is very emotional for me because it was a big change.

When you showed work from different periods all together last week, I could really see how emotional your work is. I know music plays a large part in that, but it’s also in the movement, right? How do you do that?

Well, I’m a feeling person. The part of dance that I love is the part that I can’t understand intellectually. It’s the part that I feel somatically. If I’m in my brain I don’t make very good stuff. But if I slip into that intuitive state, then stuff comes out. And sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s mean.

It seems that sometimes the music comes after you’ve made the movement, and sometimes you make the movement to the music. Which do you prefer?

I learned to make movement first because I was an improviser. I started improvising with Steve Paxton in college, so movement came from physics, not from music. Then in the ’90s, when I started going out with Michael Clark, he proposed that we make a version of “The Rite of Spring” together and of course, that music existed. So I started with Stravinsky—I mean, how audacious. I could make it in the way that I did because I didn’t understand—I don’t read music, I don’t know ballet. I can count to 8, I can count to 12, but I’m not looking at the score, reading it and laying my movement on top of it. I’m feeling it as I go along. There’s a certain rhythm—it’s very sharp—when the work is good. It’s usually a downbeat on half-time.

You mentioned that the work will be available for restaging. You’re fully in control of your archive?

I own the work. The board gave me personal ownership 15 years ago, around the time Martha Graham passed, when that whole thing was going on. The board acted very quickly to take care of me in that way.

Stephen Petronio Company in “MiddleSexGorge.” Photograph by Robert Altman

I liked watching you work with the dancers today. You were right there, up close with feedback, in the moment while they were still moving: “That’s good, that’s good, that’s good, that’s not quite what I want.” You knew every move, you were focused, you were very fast. Yet also it seemed nurturing.

Well, I love them. And I do work fast. Sometimes that’s really frustrating for them, but if I can trick them out of their heads by moving quickly, their instincts respond. That’s what I’m after.

How many learn each role?

I learned very early on to make everything doubles. When touring, if somebody got injured there was a drama because there wasn’t an understudy. There was barely enough money for the dancer onstage. So if you look at my early work, there’s always two people working in unison. I like to see things twice. And also if one person drops out, there’s at least one person left.

The audience at Jacob’s Pillow. What do you want to place in their minds with this last performance?

I would like them to feel the burn of what’s disappearing. I want them to be so excited about what we’re doing that they’re going to really miss it when it’s gone. I want them to see the lushness of my dancers. My work is not an easy read. You have to find your way through it. I would like them to enjoy finding their way.

Your dancers. After this 17 weeks, what happens to them?

Now, you’re gonna really make me cry. [He chokes up.] I asked them to choose things they wanted to learn because I hope they dance it some more. I hope they have that opportunity. I used to protect the work. I want people to have it now. There’s work that looks like mine or that’s been influenced by mine—I love that. All my secrets are out. That’s all I can do.

Karen Hildebrand

Karen Hildebrand is former editorial director for Dance Magazine and served as editor in chief for Dance Teacher for a decade. An advocate for dance education, she was honored with the Dance Teacher Award in 2020. She follows in the tradition of dance writers who are also poets (Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson), with poetry published in many literary journals and in her book, Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.

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