A few years ago, Stephen Petronio, one of New York’s most talked-about contemporary choreographers, explained his strategy for creating dances: “I think of making movement as pouring water through a maze. I have to make a maze, and if I can pour myself through it, I’ve done the choreography.” Most recently, he applied his esoteric formula to Manhattan in the lingering shadow of 9/11. The result, performed last week at Harbourfront Premiere Dance Theatre, is a brooding triptych that captures the melancholic atmosphere of lost souls drifting through a shattered urban landscape.
The program begins in a reflective mode with “Broken Man,” in which Petronio dances alone downstage, trapped in a small square of white light. Garbed in a disheveled dark suit, he embodies the ubiquitous TV news figure of the dazed New York businessman in the moments after the fall of the twin towers. Petronio’s limber body sways, contracts, and unfurls to a haunting piano arrangement by Blixa Bargeld (former guitarist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). His fingers twist into silent gestures of distress while his hips and torso articulate their own twitching story of dislocation. As the anonymous man dances out his meticulous and restrained poetry of pain, you notice that his suit jacket has been blown awry: strapped to his torso with tape, it lends him the appearance of having a third, dislocated, arm.
The theme of fractured spirits is sustained in the next piece on the programme, “City of Twist,” in which five dancers perform an extended elegy against a backdrop that shifts from a giant crescent moon suspended over a starry sky to projections of jagged back-alley fire escapes. Here, Petronio’s choreography (to an electronic score by 80s icon Laurie Anderson) sweeps fluently from balletic to postmodern modes. The costumes-rumpled white shirts over cotton briefs for the men and mini slip dresses for the women-suggest a state of unreadiness, as though everyone has been caught either in the act of dressing or undressing.
Petronio has stated that the title refers to Manhattan and its alienated inhabitants, but the underside of the piece, with its variation on the theme of naughty children and demonic dolls, is a darkly ironic take on childhood-think Mother Goose on meth. The dancers are costumed in children’s pajamas and baby-doll nighties, and the girls’ faces, framed by tight pigtails, are smeared with black eye shadow. Celebrity postmodern artist Cindy Sherman contributes a ghoulish horror film stagescape of gigantic dismembered baby dolls. The raw and mottled acoustic environment is poured on hard and heavy by Lou Reed, whose serrated crooning is countered here and there by the Velvet Underground and Zeitkratzer (with a whimsical punch delivered by the McGarrigle sisters).
The piece begins with a nightmarish bedtime story-Reed’s perverse adaptation of Poe’s “The Raven,” recited in a raspy baritone by Willem Dafoe. “Once upon a midnight dreary,” he snarls, and goes on to detail a state of drug-induced despair as the baby goths cavort limp-bodied at their unsupervised pajama party-kids who never go to bed in the city that never sleeps. An adult voyeur (Petronio) appears briefly on the scene, sprawled on a chair. Alternately playful and bored, but sexualized through the pedophiliac gaze, the “children” romp aimlessly around their infernal playroom. The gruesome climax comes when two dancers rush forward and decapitate a giant two-headed doll.
Surprisingly, an understated levity saves Petronio’s work from descending into cliché or alienating self-indulgence. No one ever cracks a smile in these dances, but nobody overplays the anguish either, and the gritty choreography is saturated with an unpretentious devil-may-care spirit of collective anarchy. There’s often an inanimate quality to his dancers, especially in the repetitive movement sequences which they enact ritualistically (and with flawless technical precision), or when they slump to the floor like rag dolls, staring blankly at their toes.
In the hands of a less able choreographer, such stylistic single-mindedness could easily veer into hypnotic monotony. But for Petronio, the calculated risk-taking pays off. Recurrent motifs hint at post-traumatic repetitive disorders rather than artistic stagnation. After all, the raw disintegrating force of 9/11 inspires a need for cautious simplicity. And this philosophy is what makes Petronio’s odes for broken adults with broken spirits and broken children with broken toys so achingly powerful.
