Former bad boy of dance Stephen Petronio tells Christine Maddenabout his soft side and working with Rufus Wainwright
Quiz time: You're studying medicine and nearing graduation. Do you (a) purchase a shining set of new golf clubs and a natty hat to go with your free trial membership at a posh golf club? (b) accept one of the many offers of a platinum credit card to put a down payment on a BMW? (c) change course radically to become a contemporary dancer, knowing full well you may soon be selling pencils on a street corner to supplement your income?
Answers: if you picked (a) or (b), you're clearly a mentally sound product of burgeoning 21st-century Ireland. If you picked (c), you're probably Stephen Petronio.
Despite what you might expect, the story has a happy ending. Petronio may not be attempting to putt on beautifully tweezed greens or motoring about merrily in his Beemer, but he did become one of the edgiest choreographers in the US, and he has managed to sustain his own dance company for 23 years, a fact of which he is immensely proud. Having appeared at International Dance Festival Ireland in 2004, the company returns to the country this summer, to the Galway Arts Festival, with a triple bill: Bud Suite, Bloom and The Rite Part.
"I grew up in a very lower middle-class Italian household in New Jersey, and art was not on the agenda," Petronio recalls. "Especially dance. So being the first one to go to college, I went into pre-med because that's what I thought I was supposed to do as the 'good son', and went into a dance class at the suggestion of a friend, just to relax."
Furnishing him with "classic thunderbolt moments", his dance classes proved so exciting that he turned his back on the respectable middle-class future he had been preparing for.
"I was dumb enough to roll with the punches in those days," Petronio explains. "And I say 'dumb' in the best sense of the word. I didn't really know what I was getting into, so I didn't have any fear about it. And I didn't know what the rules were, so I didn't care."
Not knowing rules came in handy for Petronio's career. His lack of concern - some might say respect - for artistic and social norms, as well as his driving interest in sexual politics, brought him a reputation as a firebrand. And he received ample assistance in mischievously thumbing his nose at the public not only from his company, but also from a string of collaborations with stars working at the rough edges of the arts world, such as Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, Lou Reed and Wire.
As a dancer, Petronio landed - so to speak - on his feet. He became the first male dancer in choreographer Trisha Brown's company in 1979. "Here I was with Trisha Brown, who's a genius, and . . ." Petronio interrupts himself in his enthusiasm, ". . . I mean, I love to tell this story. In that first year, Trisha would have the dancers over to dinner at Robert Rauschenberg's house or Donald Judd's house, and I barely knew who they were. You know, the greatest living artists in America. And there I am having dinner and chatting with them. I had no idea."
The experience opened Petronio's eyes to new inventive possibilities. "Trisha's matrix was one of collaboration with great visual artists. So that really inspired me."
PETRONIO THEN MADE a move to start his own company - and again found himself stepping into new territory as he discovered he had a talent for choreography. His restless and energetic nature - "I'm a fire sign, an Aries, you know, I don't sit still" - spills over into his work. Petronio lets both physical and creative energy loose on stage with such vigour and fluid command as to prompt speculation by New York dance critic Deborah Jowitt about his dancers having titanium joints that they remove and oil every evening.
Applied to subjects such as sexual politics, for example in his work MiddleSexGorge (1990, with music by English art-school punk band Wire), the velocity and growling, defiant attitude of his choreography earned him a reputation as a bad boy.
Petronio's romantic partnership with the equally untameable British choreographer and dancer Michael Clark (who appeared at the first Dance Festival Ireland in 2002), did nothing to soften that image. "We were lovers for a number of years," Petronio says, "and we did make some work together," notably in a work called Bed Piece (1989), which invited audiences to watch them perform the more intimate aspects of their relationship.
Yet Petronio sagely regards the sometimes sensational attention he receives as a necessary evil. "It does make it easier for people to write about me when they latch on to that kind of crap. So if they can talk about the fact that I had sex in public, or whatever I'm wearing, then they run with that. But that's just all about media."
With his usual disregard for public expectations, Petronio's vision and style deepened in the wake of 9/11. During the difficult period following the attacks, when many companies couldn't get gigs, he joined forces with musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson to create The City of Twist (2002), which came to the dance festival in 2004 in a double bill with The Island of Misfit Toys (2003, a collaboration with Lou Reed). In what he regards as "one of the quintessential collaborations of my career to date", Petronio explored individuals in a world seismically shifted by destruction and fear. "We made the work with no money and no bookings - it was kind of a compulsive need to be together as a company and dance. So it was made for the same reasons that I started dancing: because I absolutely felt that I had to."
PETRONIO'S NEW PIECES at the Galway Arts Festival, Bud Suite and Bloom, germinated during this time. He invited singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright to the premiere of Misfit Toys because Wainwright's mother, Kate McGarrigle, was performing one of Reed's songs for the production. Although Wainwright agreed to collaborate on a new piece, he took his time, so Petronio went ahead and choreographed short pieces to some of his songs. His work to entice Wainwright back to the project - which became Bud Suite - was successful, and they embarked on the creative effort that became Bloom.
"His one requirement was that he didn't want to write words," Petronio explains. "So we decided that it would be poetry: he chose Emily Dickinson, and I chose Walt Whitman. And then the part of the Lux Aeterna out of the Catholic Mass, it was something we agreed on just because we thought it would be beautiful with the theme of Bloom, which is transformation."
For those who only knew his harder, more controversial work, Bloom represents a transformation for Petronio as well. "Hope is the thing with feathers," a choir intones in the background, as his dancers, clad in blossom-like costumes, cavort like self-possessed and agile sprites. Bud Suite sees them in more familiar territory, as they fling their limbs and slouch nonchalantly into position with the loose extravagance of post-coital bodies.
The third part of the triple bill, The Rite Part, maintains the spring theme. This excerpt of Full Half Wrong (1992), Petronio's version of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, animates the legend of a woman made to dance to death in a pagan fertility ritual.
"For me, it was just a sexist myth. You know, like, why do you have to kill a virgin just to grow corn? So my slant on the work was not about victimising a female to grow corn, but more about empowering a sexual female to move forward. The virgin sacrifice is not a sacrifice, it's a strident and violent affirmation of open sexuality and violence for that woman."
THE PROGRAMME FOR Galway combines Petronio's past with his present. After a period of dark work, he felt the need to "invoke" hope. "The idea's a little corny," he admits, "but you know what, who gives a s**t? I think it comes from a very honest place, and I was concerned about doing something so warm, but I'm very happy that I did it."
Is he sorry to be shifting away from the immediate allure of the "bad boy" image?
"You can't be a boy forever, bad or good," Petronio reasons. "I am a man, and I'm making the best work I can. I'm not afraid of beauty or joy. Those tags were from the very early part of my career, and you know, I still like to irritate people, but I also like to please them, too."
And he likes to keep his audience guessing, as much as he likes to enthral them. "With the work, I speak to your unconscious. Don't look for a conscious story or you'll lose interest and get confused. Just come and enjoy it on an intuitive level. Don't worry about what it's about. Just let it go in your eyes and see what happens."
The Stephen Petronio Dance Company will perform Bloom, Bud Suite and The Rite Part at the Black Box Theatre, Galway, on July 24-28 at 8pm, €22/€20 concessions, as part of the Galway Arts Festival, which opens on Monday.
www.galwayartsfestival.com