![\"Andy](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/AJ-RaIN-2-150407_S_Petronio_rainforest_013.jpg\")
<\/a>Merce Cunningham’s RainForest:<\/em> Andy Warhol’s silver pillows share the stage with Davalois Fearon and Gino Grenek of the Stephen Petronio Company. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n Decades ago, when Twyla Tharp was a feisty young choreographer, she said that maintaining and presenting dances from her repertory was just not something she wanted to do. It would be like chewing gum, she said, and who wanted to keep on chewing it after the initial flavor was gone? The brilliant upstarts of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960\u2019s were also keen on the next thing to try, not interested in reviving last year\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n Now thoughts of heritage and history are in the air. Preservation and innovation duke it out in the Martha Graham Dance Company. The Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n Company searches for contemporary dancemakers whose works might fit the company profile, even as it revives Passacaglia <\/em>by Lim\u00f3n\u2019s mentor Doris Humphrey and performs it onstage alongside pieces by Paul Taylor during the Taylor company\u2019s recent Lincoln Center season, as part of an entity titled Paul Taylor\u2019s American Modern Dance. In accord with Merce Cunningham\u2019s wishes, his company dissolved two years after his death. Now his dances are being judiciously scattered among other companies. Just this spring, I have seen Compagnie CNDC-Anger, perform a Cunningham \u201cEvent,\u201d directed by the French company\u2019s director, Robert Swinston (https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2015\/03\/the-merce-resurrection\/<\/a>). Another former Cunningham dancer, Rashaun Mitchell, assembled an Event out of material from Cunningham pieces familiar to him for New York University-Tisch School of the Arts\u2019 Second Avenue Dance Company. Still another, Jennifer Goggins, staged Biped<\/em> for the spring performances of Juilliard Dance (https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2015\/04\/juilliard-dance-tackles-masterworks\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n And this week, at the Joyce, the Stephen Petronio Company is performing Cunningham\u2019s RainForest<\/em>, staged by Andrea Weber, with assistance from Meg Harper and Mitchell (all alumni of Cunningham\u2019s company). What\u2019s going on here? Petronio recently turned 59 and looks to be in excellent shape, so he can\u2019t be thinking of his company\u2019s future without him. Instead, the mounting of this 1968 Cunningham work is part of a project that he labels \u201cBloodlines,\u201d and over the next five years, he plans to present work by Trisha Brown, in whose company he danced, as well ones by Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton (he already, in 2012, performed Paxton\u2019s solo Intravenous Lecture<\/em>). In other words, he\u2019s generously acknowledging his own roots, along with the legacy of innovation in modern dance that Cunningham instigated.<\/p>\n Joshua Tuason and Melissa Toogood pass each other in the first part of Stephen Petronio’s Locomotor\/Non Locomotor<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n The RainForest <\/em>revival ends a program that begins with Petronio\u2019s Locomotor\/Non Locomotor<\/em>, a 55-minute pairing of the 2014 Locomotor<\/em> with its world-premiere cousin, Non Locomotor<\/em>, The earlier piece, which celebrated his company\u2019s 30th<\/sup>-anniversary season, has become richer and deeper during its year-long ageing process. Special guest artist Melissa Toogood (another former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company) is even more extraordinary in her opening solo than she was last year. She begins in low light (by Kenneth Tabachnick) and silence. She makes the complex movements that Petronio has cast onto her body look like daily-life activities in a concrete jungle. She bends her torso extravagantly, often in seeming opposition to her hips or her head; her legs whip smoothly about, and so do her arms. Yet, she makes everything cohere into a serious, fluent physical monologue and can rein herself instantly into watchful stillness before erupting into the next bout of dancing. Often she suspends a difficult moment, as if taking a breath before plunging on.<\/p>\n When I wrote about Locomotor <\/em>last April, I used the word \u201ctracks\u201d to describe the eight dancers\u2019 many forays onto the stage and off and back on again (https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2014\/04\/family-ties\/<\/a>). But that term suggests the straight lines of a railroad, and what we see are most often curving paths that suggest cyclical progressions. Petronio has mentioned the twinned ideas of looking backward to one\u2019s history and forward to an unforeseeable future. As the score by Clams Casino (Michael Volpe) begins with an initially quiet jangling, Joshua Tuason walks onto the stage backward. By the time the sounds have escalated to something like tolling bells, the dance has established itself as an exacting but exhilarating voyage for a group of pilgrims who are strong of spirit, skill, and endurance. Scratch \u201cpilgrims;\u201d call them heroes\u2014their bodies and souls firmed into beauty. The music may suggest a chuffing engine, cracking whips, slow chords, buried voices, rhythmic thuds, and more, but the dancers are unfazed; their wheels are greased.<\/p>\n Jaqlin Medlock and Barrington Hinds in Stephen Petronio’s Locomotor\/Non Locomotor<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n Toogood, Tuason, Davalois Fearon, Gino Grenek, Barrington Hinds, Jaqlin Medlock, Nicholas Sciscione, and Emily Stone, or small units of them, often enter not just walking backward, but running and leaping backward. They carve out a small, half-formed circle and keep going until they exit a few feet upstage of where they entered. You get the impression that they\u2019re reeling a forward adventure back to its beginning. Of course they travel forward too (Toogood and Fearon are terrific leapers), as well as forming pairs, trios, quartets. Often they simply walk onto the stage, are absorbed onto the ongoing dancing, and leave at will. I wonder whether retrograding their way through a passage of movement is part of the game.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of stillness in Locomotor<\/em>, as well as variety in terms of speed. Maybe a bit of Cunningham\u2019s artistic DNA has gotten into Petronio: fast movements sputter out but yield to moments of calm deliberation. Currents of dancing flow past temporary immobile islands.<\/p>\n Sometimes Tabachnick\u2019s illumination is like harsh sunlight, but it\u2019s softer, as I remember, at the end, when the dancers move into lines facing the audience, or turning away. Pairs break out of those lines for quick adventures\u2014physically demanding but never aggressive with each other. Facing the past, staring at the future, meeting both in the here and now.<\/p>\n Davalois Fearon and Nicholas Sciscione in the new second part of Stephen Petronio’s There\u2019s much less travelling in Non Locomotor<\/em>, which begins after a short pause. Fearon tunes us in to the new slant on movement. She has changed out of her black, gray, and white outfit by Narciso Rodriguez into a bright blue one, and, while she may leap into action, she begins standing in one place and working her body as if forces inside it were migrating here and there, causing her spine to ripple, her shoulders to lift and circle, her hips to sway, her feet to jitter. The three men who spend time with her (Tuason, Grenek, and Sciscione) also investigate the ways in which their arms and hands can gesture, their heads can adjust on their necks, their hips can thrust forward.<\/p>\n (L to R): Gino Grenek, Joshua Tuason, and Nicholas Sciscione in Stephen Petronio’s Non Locomotor<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n They pose in sculptural ways, and Fearon, a blue streak, passes between them and among them. Although they lift her, she\u2019s one of the gang. When the four of them divide into two couples, these drift in and out of synchrony as the paired dancers play catch and release or lean together. The four end Non Locomotor<\/em> separated, bending forward and clapping their hands together\u2014not as if they were applauding, but as if they were summoning some force out of the ground.<\/p>\n I recall Merce Cunningham once alluding to RainForest <\/em>as being \u201cabout\u201d a small community. I saw this ravishingly beautiful dance for a group of six around 1968 when it was new and again in the 1970s with a different cast (the premiere in Buffalo\u2014where the company had a residency at SUNY-Buffalo and Buffalo State College\u2014was filmed, and the later version appeared on television in 1976 for WNET\u2019s Dance in America series). I did indeed see the six as forming a community, although one in which each of them was used to spending time alone. I thought of them as akin to a renegade pride of lions\u2014with a leader, solitary hunters, interlopers, matings, and squabbles polished into a kind of mystical formality. Both David Vaughan in his masterly book Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years<\/em> and Carolyn Brown in her marvelous Chance and Circumstance<\/em> bring up the possible influence of nature on RainForest<\/em>. One inspiration may have been Colin Turnbull\u2019s The Forest People<\/em> about the pygmies and their treks through jungles of impeding branches (which Cunningham was reading at the time). The rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he was raised, may also have fed into the dance.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>
Locomotor\/Non Locomotor<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n<\/a>