Stephen Petronio Company Announces Fifth Season Of BLOODLINES

"There's a visceral thrill to Stephen Petronio's choreography that is unlike anything offered by other contemporary choreographers." -The New York Times

In 2015, Stephen Petronio Company culminated its 30th anniversary 2014-15 season with a transformation: the launch of Bloodlines. This autobiographical project not only honors the lineage of American postmodern dance, but also traces the influences and impulses that have shaped choreographer Stephen Petronio, an artist uniquely positioned to preserve this postmodern tradition.

For the fifth season of Bloodlines, presented by NYU Skirball and running April 11-13, Stephen Petronio Company will debut Merce Cunningham's Tread (1970) as part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial. With music by Christian Wolff performed live by members of Composers Inside Electronics, Tread features costumes by Cunningham and décor by Bruce Nauman that consists of ten large industrial fans blowing out into the audience. Tread will be complemented by Coverage (1970) by Rudy Perez, one of the singular artists of color of the Judson Dance Theatre. Born in 1929, Perez was a student of Cunningham's and, until recently, an artist largely excluded from the dominant postmodern canon.

Completing the program is American Landscapes, a new full-company work by Petronio with visual design by American artist Robert Longo, an original score by the musical duo of Dutch minimalist composer and lute player Jozef Van Wissem and American filmmaker and composer Jim Jarmusch, and lighting by longtime collaborator Ken Tabachnick. American Landscapes is a series of shifting pastoral, emotional, and social "kinetic canvases" that reflect the complicated beauty and roiling histories of the United States of America. The work features Petronio's signature, virtuosic movement language within Longo's large-scale, potent imagery, and Van Wissem and Jarmusch's investigation of multiple historical renditions of the poetry and anthem America the Beautiful.

"In my new company work, American Landscapes, I'm honored to continue the postmodern tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration with some of the greatest living artists of our time," says Petronio. "With Merce Cunningham's Tread, we bolster our commitment to history as the sole American modern dance company with the ability to perform a full-evening Cunningham program. Rudy Perez is one of the Judson members who altered dance-making for future generations. While his contributions are underrecognized, his experimentations are evident in Coverage, which uniquely explores values of minimalism and theatricality, essentialism and drama."

Bloodlines began with Merce Cunningham's iconicRainForest (1968) and continued with Trisha Brown's proscenium masterpiece Glacial Decoy (1979). The third season, nominated for two "Bessie" awards, included a collection of works by postmodern instigators Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Anna Halprin, and last April, the fourth season featured Cunningham's playful and indeterminate Signals (1970).

The Stephen Petronio Company dancers areBria Bacon, Ernesto Breton, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, Ryan Pliss, Nicholas Sciscione (Assistant to the Artistic Director), Mac Twining, and Megan Wright. Joining the Company for Merce Cunningham's Tread are Taylor Boyland and guest artist Brandon Collwes, a former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Performances by Stephen Petronio Company will take place April 11-13 at 7:30pm at NYU Skirball (566 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan). Tickets, priced from $55-$65, can be purchased at nyuskirball.org or by calling 212-998-4941.

About Stephen Petronio Company

Acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, Stephen Petronio is widely regarded as one of the leading dance-makers of his generation. New music, visual art, and fashion collide in his dances, producing powerfully modern landscapes for the senses. He has built a body of work with some of the most talented and provocative artists in the world, including composers Atticus Ross, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Nico Muhly, Fischerspooner, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Son Lux, Nick Cave, James Lavelle, Michael Nyman, Sheila Chandra, Diamanda Galás, Andy Teirstein, Wire, Peter Gordon, Lenny Pickett, and David Linton; visual artists Janine Antoni, Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor, Donald Baechler, Stephen Hannock, Tal Yarden, Arnaldo Ferrara, and Justin Terzi III; fashion designers Narciso Rodriguez, John Bartlett, Jillian Lewis, Adam Kimmel, Benjamin Cho, Michael Angel, Tony Cohen, Rachel Roy, Tara Subkoff, Tanya Sarne/Ghost, Leigh Bowery, Paul Compitus, Manolo, Yonson Pak, H. Petal, Iris Bonner/These Pink Lips and Patricia Field; and Resident Lighting Designer Ken Tabachnick.

Founded in 1984, Stephen Petronio Company has performed in 40 countries throughout the world, including numerous New York City engagements and 24 seasons at The Joyce Theater. The Company has been commissioned by Dance Umbrella Festival/London, Hebbel Theater/Berlin, Scène National de Sceaux, Festival d'Automne à Paris, CNDC Angers/France, The Holland Festival, Festival Montpellier Danse, Danceworks UK Ltd, Festival de Danse-Cannes, and in the U.S. by San Francisco Performances, The Joyce Theater, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, and White Bird, among others. In 2017, SPC completed a five-week residency in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam teaching and performing as a part of the sixth season of DanceMotionUSA supported by the U.S. Department of State and Brooklyn Academy Of Music.

The 2014-15 season marked the first incarnation of Bloodlines, a project of Stephen Petronio Company to honor and curate a lineage of American postmodern dance masters. Distinguished for creating original languages that embody the highest level of artistic excellence displayed through extreme physical and conceptual rigor, these artists have had a profound impact on Petronio's own artistic path. To date, the Company has restaged eight works, by Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton, receiving two New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award nominations for the 2017 Bloodlines season. Two new pieces, by Merce Cunningham and Rudy Perez, will be added to the repertoire for the 2018/19 Season. The juxtapositions of Bloodlines repertory alongside Petronio's works offers audiences an experiential insight into the evolution of this strand of creativity in American choreography.

In 2016, Stephen Petronio Company expanded its focus on American postmodern dance to explore the meaning of legacy and its impact on the future and sustainability of this most ephemeral art form. With an eye toward securing artists' consistent ability to create and explore, the Petronio Residency Center (PRC) has been established as a retreat center where research and the creative process will be paramount. After launching the Campaign for PRC, $1M was raised within 12 months to facilitate the purchase of Crow's Nest, a 175-acre property in Cairo, New York, 20 minutes from the burgeoning Catskill and Hudson, New York art scenes. Paid artist residencies began in the summer of 2018, providing dedicated rehearsal space and resources for our inaugural resident artists, Nora Chipaumire, Will Rawls and Kathy Westwater. and their collaborators to develop new work in an environment unfettered by market constraints and away from the daily pressures of urban life. The program will become part of a growing ecosystem in the U.S. dedicated to fostering a new model for the future of contemporary dance.

Stephen Petronio Company was recently featured in the documentary film "If the Dancer Dances" by Maia Wechsler and Lise Friedman, which follows the Company in its first season of Bloodlines as they restage Merce Cunningham's iconicRainForest (1968).

For more information about the company, visit www.petron.io.

About Stephen Petronio

Stephen Petronio is a choreographer, dancer, and the Artistic Director of the Stephen Petronio Company. Petronio was born in Newark, New Jersey, and received a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began his early training in improvisation and dance technique. He was greatly influenced by working with Steve Paxton and was the first male dancer of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (1979 to 1986). He has gone on to build a unique career, receiving numerous accolades, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, an American Choreographer Award, a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award, and a 2015 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.

Petronio has created over 80 original works and has been commissioned by some of the world's most prestigious modern and ballet companies, including William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt (1987), Deutsche Oper Berlin (1992), Lyon Opera Ballet (1994), Maggio Danza Florence (1996), Sydney Dance Company (2003, full evening), Norrdans (2006), the Washington Ballet (2007), The Scottish Ballet (2007), and two works for National Dance Company Wales (2010 and 2013). Petronio collaborates regularly with visual artists, musicians, and fashion designers, including Cindy Sherman, Janine Antoni, Antony and The Johnsons, Nico Muhly, Imitation of Christ, and Narciso Rodriguez.

Petronio, whose training originated with leading figures of the Judson era, performed Man Walking Down the Side of a Building in 2010 for Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Whitney Museum, and performed his 2012 rendition of Steve Paxton's Intravenous Lecture (1970) in New York, Portland and at the TEDMED-2012 conference at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, DC. Petronio received the distinction of being named the first Artist-in-Residence at The Joyce Theater from 2012 to 2014. He has been entangled with visual artist Janine Antoni in a number of discipline-blurring projects, including the video installation Honey Baby (2013), created in collaboration with composer Tom Laurie and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, and most recently Ally, in collaboration with Anna Halprin and Adrian Heathfield, which premiered at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in summer of 2016. Petronio and Antoni were the 2017 McCormack Artists in Residence at Skidmore college, where their series of installations, Entangle, was shown through July of 2017. Petronio's memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict, is available at Amazon.com.

 

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