{"id":6318,"date":"2019-04-18T15:21:46","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T19:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=6318"},"modified":"2019-04-29T17:34:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T21:34:01","slug":"tracing-bloodlines-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2019\/04\/tracing-bloodlines-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracing Bloodlines"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Stephen Petronio Company at Skirball<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Stephen Petronio’s American Landscapes<\/em>. (L to R): Bria Bacon. Jaqlin Medlock (back to camera), Ryan Pliss, unidentified, and Megan Wright. Photo: Ian Gibson
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American choreographers in the modern dance world have tended to disavow their heritages as they made new discoveries. In the 1930s, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey labored to find their own styles and disavowed any influence that might have trickled down from Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, in whose companies they had danced. Did Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins acknowledge carrying forward into their own work what they had learned while dancing Graham\u2019s choreography? Are you kidding? Steve Paxton performed in Cunningham\u2019s company, but watching his own work, you might not have guessed that.Stephen Petronio initially got our attention as the first male dancer to join Trisha Brown\u2019s company; he founded his own group in 1984 while still dancing with her. \u00a0He, unlike some of those listed above, honored the influences that slipped onto his body and into his choreography, whether these were visible or not. Since presenting his Bloodlines<\/em> project in his company\u2019s 2014-2015 season, he has re-introduced audiences to eleven works by Cunningham, Brown, Paxton, Anna Halprin, and Yvonne Rainer. His recent season at NYU Skirball added Rudy Perez\u2019s 1970 Coverage Revisited <\/em>and a revival of Cunningham\u2019s Tread<\/em> (also 1970) to a program featuring his own new American Landscapes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Members of the Stephen Petronio Company in Merce Cunningham’s Tread.<\/em> (L to R): Mac Twining, Megan Wright, Jaqlin Medlock (behind in yellow), Nicholas Sciscione supporting her, Ernesto Breton, Taylor Boyland, Brandon Collwes (guest artist), and Bria Bacon. Photo: Ian Douglan<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In Tread<\/em>, staged by Jennifer Goggans,  the ten performers (including guest artist Brandon Collwes, like Goggans a former Cunningham company dancer) spend a lot of time sitting on the floor or standing around to watch what\u2019s going on; they leave; they return. On their own, they\u2019re powerhouses\u2014sleek, up for anything: leaping, hopping, tilting, falling, rolling, lunging, using one leg like a pointer, flicking their feet busily around, whirling an arm, working out a complex collaboration among their limbs.  However, as is usual in a dance by Cunningham, they don\u2019t seem flung about the stage by inner tempests or imagined gales. They\u2019re alert, mostly erect, aware of what they\u2019re doing and what they need to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bruce Nauman\u2019s set for Tread<\/em> consists of ten tall standing fans lined up across the front of the stage. Every other one is turning back and forth as it blows. After a while though, you hardly notice this gleaming army separating the dancers from the audience. At the Saturday performance, Seth Cluett, John Driscoll, and Phil Edelman of Composers Inside Electronics (CIE), the musicians playing Christian Wolff\u2019s For 1, 2, or 3 People <\/em>in the pit constitute another formidable dividing line. Behind these, Petronio\u2019s dancers, wearing brightly colored practice clothes based on Cunningham\u2019s designs, create a rumpus of movement.
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Pretty soon you notice that in this world, people expect to help one another. Tess Montoya may dance briefly alone and in silence. Nicholas Sciscione may embark on a solo that involves shaking his hands vigorously. Two may work together: Megan Wright, say, and Collwes, or Bria Bacon and Ryan Pliss.  But often people will get themselves into a complicated position, and someone else will come up and rearrange them or disentangle them. Ernesto Breton is hoisted by Sciscione, Pliss, and Mac Twining and set down elsewhere. No one\u2014including Taylor Boyland and Jaqlin Medlock\u2014objects to being moved around or helped into something new and interesting, even when the task gets awkward (two of the men, spraddled-legged, waddle along, one behind the other, lugging a third man who\u2019s prone under the arch of their bent legs).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Merce Cunningham’s Tread.<\/em> (L to R): Ryan Pliss, Taylor Boyland, Nicholas Sciscione (above her), Brandon Collwes (bent foward), Ernesto Breton (on floor), Mac Twining (half hidden), Jaqlin Medlock, and Tess Montoya. Photo: Ian Douglas<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Your pulses have to slow down quite a bit after the fans have been unplugged and pulled away on little wheeled platforms so that Rudy Perez\u2019s Coverage Revisited<\/em> can begin. Perez, once a New Yorker, has lived and worked in Los Angeles for decades, and Sarah Swenson helped him coach Ernesto Breton in the solo.  I saw Perez (who had made his debut at Judson Church) perform it in 1970 at the Cubiculo, 414 West 51th Street in Manhattan, in a concert that included his colleagues, Barbara Roan and Anthony La Giglia. The white-painted brick space was below street level and deeper than it was wide.  I, three years into my new career as a dance critic, wrote that \u201cHis own performing style is suffused with emotion and motion kept back. He edges from stillness into motion as if dancing were a chasm from which no return would be possible.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ernesto Breton, taking on the role,\nis not as solidly built as Perez was back then, but meticulously assumes the\nstolidity and the control. Wearing white coveralls, sneakers, and a royal blue\nhelmet, he is captured by Joe Doran\u2019s lighting in mid-step, profile to the\naudience. We hear a newscaster\u2019s voice, traffic sounds, street protests, a\nmarching band, more. Blackout. Lights up. He\u2019s in the same arrested stride but\nin another place onstage. When he begins to move, it\u2019s to march toward us and\nthen side-step upstage, his gaze steady. Once, briefly, he stands, his arms\nspread out to either side, wrists flexed, as if he\u2019s stopping traffic in both\ndirections. His shoes squeak with his footfalls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matter-of-factly, without any\nextraneous moves, this worker lays lines of tape along the stage floor to form\na square and in this carefully delineated space, removes his helmet and his\ncoveralls. I think I hear a voice, buried in the sound assemblage, say \u201cAy,\nmuerte!\u201d I hear two clangs, as if from a trolley.  In his underpants, Breton is still\ncontrolled, even when walking, running in a circle, falling slowly backward, or\njumping as if to get a ball in a basket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1970, the war in Vietnam was winding down, and anti-war protests were escalating. Coverage<\/em> Revisited <\/em>ends with the then-familiar voice of Kate Smith singing \u201cGod Bless America.\u201d Breton, having stepped back into his coveralls and put on his helmet, stares in our direction, removes the helmet, and places it not over his heart, but over his crotch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stephen Petronio’s American Landscapes<\/em>. Ernesto Breton holding Nicholas Sciscione. Behind them: one of Robert Longo’s images. Photo: Ian Douglas<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Only in retrospect did I think of\nthe three dances making up the Stephen Petronio Company\u2019s performances at the\nSkirball in relation to one another. The intricate, watchful, apparently\nlight-hearted experiments in a curiously guarded atmosphere; one man\u2019s\nstatement during a dragging-on war that many condemned; and Petronio\u2019s new and\ngripping American Landscapes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/em>The piece is set to a commissioned score by the adventurous lutenist\/composer Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch (filmmaker\/guitarist\/composer\/electronics expert), who have collaborated on three albums so far. The music has a mournful, obsessive kind of beauty, as if it were being dropped bit by bit into a bottomless hole. I\u2019ve read that it draws on \u201cmultiple historical renditions of the poetry and anthem “America the Beautiful.\u201d Projections by Robert Longo appear on all or part of a huge, three-paneled screen designed by Don Cieslik. You may at first think you\u2019re seeing black and white photographs, but these are actually charcoal drawings on paper. Among them are images of congested city streets, two men in cowboy hats, a football player taking a knee, an airplane, an atomic bomb cloud, a ruined church, but also ones of earth as a globe, of a giant tree, of cloud-infested skies, and of a huge, curling ocean wave\u2014like something out of Japanese print. You can compare one view of an American flag blowing in the wind with a later one whose edges are frayed and torn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stephen Petronio and Martha Eddy introduce Petronio’s American Landscapes. <\/em>Photo: Ian Douglas<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

An enigmatic prologue features\nPetronio and Martha Eddy, an expert in Somatic Education and Therapy. She met\nand danced with him when both were students at Hampshire College in the 1970s.\nMaybe that\u2019s why they\u2014 talking and laughing silently together\u2014come together in\na ballroom-dance position now and then and do a little casual waltzing. Faintly\nresembling astronauts in their jumpsuits (red for him, blue for her), they\nperuse a book (I later learn it\u2019s A\nPeople\u2019s History of the United States <\/em>by scholar and activist Howard Zinn);\nthe white pages they turn, plus their outfits, make up the colors of the U.S.\nflag. Feet well apart and leaning together to form a slightly wobbly pyramid,\nthey walk along. Like college pals studying together, they point out meaningful\npassages in the book and lie supine, his head on her belly. Her last act is to\nadvance toward the audience alone, opening her arms to us, then retreating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dancers appear as if summoned up. All are clad in gray: sleeveless leotards for the women, high-waisted trunks for the men (costumes by H.Petal). They paint with their bodies and with their adventures what one piece of publicity refers to as  \u201ckinetic canvases.\u201d I would have to see American Landscapes <\/em>again to be able to fathom the subtle coincidences between the projections and the dancing. Imagine, for instance, that you see that huge breaking wave looming over the stage and at some later point see the dancers, holding hands, make a movement ripple down a line. Later still, in another line, they stumble and fall, but, buoyed up by their colleagues, keep going. A filmed airplane passes; people drop to the ground as if hit.  Petronio doesn\u2019t stress any such possible connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ernesto Breton leaping. At his right: Bria Bacon and Taylor Boyland. Photo: Ian Douglas.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Against this backdrop, the nine\ndancers show us people collapsing, people collaborating to lift a fallen one.\nHow does a lunge become a prayer?  What\nbrings two people together in a duet? What does unison signify? When does a\nleap look like an explosion?  What does\nrunning in a circle connect to?  But\nunderstand this: Petronio\u2019s people don\u2019t appear to rest; they dance as if the\nworld would stop if they didn\u2019t keep going. Not for <\/em>us\u2014that is, not aimed at us, but on our behalf. Today, across\nour country, hatred flares. Money corrupts our democracy. The polar ice is\nmelting. The spire of the ancient Paris cathedral, Notre Dame, just went down\nin flames. Can a beautiful, piercing leap say no to these? Let\u2019s try it and\nsee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Stephen Petronio Company at Skirball American choreographers in the modern dance world have tended to disavow their heritages as they made new discoveries. In the 1930s, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey labored to find their own styles and disavowed any influence that might have trickled down from Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6318"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6347,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318\/revisions\/6347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}