AMERICAN HISTORY
by Douglas Messerli
Stephen Petronio (choreographer) American
Landscapes / NYU Skirball, 2020 (streamed live)
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.
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 intensely.
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.
What begin as duos and triplets moving forward in lateral space, in the
second part was represented, along with Longo's increasingly violent
imagery—from an almost pastoral setting, to the nuclear terror of World War II
and the post-War years—to a kind of strange line-dance, despite the failure of
some of the performers to survive it, dropping away from the linked
hand-upon-hand framework of the almost Fosse-like chorus line. Indeed, several
of Longo's images, including his glorious swirl of dark red roses suggested
iconic images from film, this particular one from Vertigo, but others from The
Magnificent Ambersons, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other films.
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.
Los Angeles, May 16, 2020
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and
Performance (May 2020).
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