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Date Posted: 16:06:14 04/07/09 Tue
Author: SS
Subject: *************STEPHENPETRONIODANCE*************

Noah Eaton
March 7th, 2008
Theater Arts 362U

Hearkening of the Unseen Buds


New York City choreographer Stephen Petronio’s latest production, gauging by the video excerpts of previous productions I had seen from him in anticipation of this performance, was a notable concept dance of sorts; being notably lighter overall compared to excerpts I had seen from “Half Wrong” and “Strange Attractors”, where I gathered from those clips a decidedly more attacking niche of dance form, induced with polycentric undercurrents and violent ephebism, in addition to a heavy emphasis on sexuality in terms of body language (as an aside, I had heard from someone who sat next to me in the upper balcony of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall that he is a fairly prominent voice in the gay rights community, as well as how the issue of the AIDS epidemic has placed gay citizens in an unfavorable light in many respects, and much of that body vocabulary perhaps comes from that.) All in all, the production embodied the same sort of ephebism and drama, with constant, disjointed movements, kicking of the legs and militant leaping and diving of the feet; yet the themes permeating the first two of three parts were decidedly upbeat and pulsating with jocund vitality.
The program consisted of three parts, beginning with a 2006 piece known as “Bud Suite”. It opened with two dancers standing together in the middle of the stage, in navy blue and red costumes, providing a heavy emphasis on counter pull. The dancers would proceed to gradually unfurl into a sweeping number of rotations and pivoting of the legs, yet pulling back together again between each revolution as through some gravitational force was pulling them back together magnetically, as the Rufus Wainwright number “Oh, What A World” provided the musical and lyrical backdrop for the segment.
However, in-between this sequence and the subsequent one where four dancers in collared white shirts and red tops darted onto the stage, heavily gyrating and grasping the hands of one another to form a chain as to suggest an “everything is interconnected” motif perhaps, among others, there was a repetitive image of one dancer appearing recumbent downstage to the right near the orchestra pit, while as few as three or as many as seven others are frolicking around upstage and around the supine dancer in an effervescent and sprightly, yet relatively forceful, manner, kicking their legs frequently with a militant feel of carpe diem. It is most clearly seen during the fourth and final portion of “Bud Suite”; performed to Wainwright’s “Agnus Dei”, where the lone motionless dancer seems to be mimicking a tulip bud struggling to break forth because of the lack of sunlight and the hoarfrost of winter, and all the other dancers were making wing-flapping motions with their arms and delirious, fighting against gravity sort of movements in general, which I interpreted as though, metaphorically, the other dancers represent the messengers of spring, reflecting the warmth and glare of the sunlight onto this dormant bud and, with their unmistakable energy representing a sort of seasonal photosynthesis phenomenon, the previously motionless dancer slowly rises, where you finally begin to see her lifting one of her legs upward, her abdomen muscles suddenly twitching, followed by some other thrusting movements in her bones, and finally rising onto her feet, spinning abruptly even if not in sync with the other dancers, and triumphantly closing the first part with her standing with all seven other dancers in a portrait of unison, of rejuvenated life.
A brief pause followed the closing of the curtain on “Bud Suite”, with only the sound of the dancers’ feet brushing the stage floor, and then the Pacific Youth Choir appeared in the previously empty orchestra pit to perform Wainwright’s musical and lyrical re-interpretation of the Lux aeterna to open up the program’s second part, “Bloom”, interlaced with selective borrowings of two of Walt Whitman’s poems (“One’s Self I Sing” and “Unseen Buds”) and Emily Dickinson’s “Hope Is The Thing With Feathers”. The Latin mass chant would serve as a thematic form of repetition throughout “Bloom”, with it opening with four dancers appearing on the stage, two standing back-to-back with their arms extended outward, and the other two kneeling on either side of them, the women wearing sea green dresses and the men wearing white shirts and navy blue shorts.
Once again, I sensed that theme of new life sprouting forth echo here, where the majority of the dancers portrayed themselves as the vibrant spirits of nature and the minority were bulbs or buds of the earth, slowly unfolding, only to dart upward from the ground with zeal as the easily-audible refrains of “Hope is the thing with flowers, that perches in the soul…” domineered the atmosphere (at moments during “Bloom”, to be honest, I felt that the lyrical overtones may have outweighed the contributions of the eight dancers, where I found myself at several moments listening too attentively to Wainwright’s lyrical re-structuring of these poems amidst the dance and I mentally was slapping myself out of that verbal trance) so that may perhaps be one of my primary critiques of the production where, as much as I think Petronio and Wainwright made a compatible artistic pairing in that Wainwright generally employed an emotional cadence in his voice that drives the dance’s central narrative, sometimes Wainwright comes across as too earnest, too wistful, that his emotions tend to bog down the pacing of the dance and, consequentially, leave the viewer in passive blanks.
In terms of performance, however, there was one notable difference between “Bloom” and “Bud Suite”, and that was “Bud Suite” included a notable male solo break featuring dancers Jonathan Jaffe and Michael Badger within the part, embodying the constant shifting of the body and the democracy of body parts in the dance, reminding me very much of Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s philosophy that: "Possibilities in dance are bound only by our imagination and our two legs." Then, following that individual break, the silhouettes of all the dancers are seen, with the dancers slowly re-appearing on the stage until all eight have arrived, with only one female appearing on the ground languorously, eventually rising much the same way as in “Bud Suite” and the dancers getting increasingly ebullient as the refrains of the Lux aeterna reach a cathartic, high soprano and dissolves into unification again.
As a brief aside, I thought the juxtapositions of light and shadow in “Bloom” deserve additional mentioning, as I felt there was an artistic purpose to that, I’m assuming to sort of highlight the whimsicality and ethereal wonder of this spring-like space in which all these dancers are residing in, as though it’s a fantasy beyond our wildest imagination come to life.
Finally, following the twenty-minute intermission, the dancers returned for the final part of the program, which proved to be quite a departure from the first two-thirds of the evening, titled “The Rite Part”; a part of a larger production Petronio choreographed in 1992 titled “Full Half Wrong”. This time, rather than Rufus Wainwright providing the musical score, the sounds of the widely influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and Mitchell Lager domineered, and the contrasts to this part from the former two probably couldn’t have been more stark. It began with four dancers recumbent on stage, making light, resignatory movements in sync, suddenly moving in counter-clockwise motions with their heads on the floor, occasionally lifting their waist up into the air with their legs, as though they were shackled or enslaved, and restricted of movement. An abrupt voiceover reminiscent of 1950’s science-fiction mania is heard, saying: “You are about to witness an abduction…” and the intense red lights fade to darkness, turning back on again to depict Jonathan Jaffe and another dancer (Davalois Fearon I think, but am not certain) appearing, juxtaposed on one side of the stage in an eerie red light, separated from the other dancers in a more welcoming blue light, yet appearing incarcerated, each making abduction-like movements, with their backs, legs and waists moving intensely and violently, yet shown with their hands tied behind their backs the entire time, further suggesting they are prisoners somewhere.
I’m not sure what to gather from the brief trio of men dancing together energetically before the final, frantic and devilish solo by Shila Tirabassi, but the Tirabassi solo was just nerve-wracking and piercing to watch, moving almost as though she was a weapon, sculpted in the form of a human animal, as the other seven dancers stood silently and motionlessly in the darkness outside her spotlight. Further adding complexity to this solo was that, despite how she moves proudly in a dictator-esque fashion, she also appears vexed, even alienated, as she stands there in the spotlight making sudden, abrupt and savage movements with her joints and frequently turning with graceless, intimidating poise, as though she herself is abducted in her own mortal superiority of sorts.
Despite the production proving to be difficult to follow in certain respects, given how, particularly when the dancers appeared altogether on stage and yet moved in their own signature ways, I found the musical score, as well as the repetition in terms of motionless bodies lunging forth, served as most helpful clues to developing a more full grasp of the big thematic picture to this production, and Stephen Petronio, as I had heard, knew how to deliver exuberance in dance form as always.

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