Perfect Storm
Stephen Petronio interviewed by Donald Hutera

Most artists weather their fair share of creative storms. Dance Umbrella veteran Stephen Petronio has done better than that. To mark the 25th anniversary of his eponymous company, the acclaimed New York choreographer has manufactured his own metaphorical storm on stage.

With a title derived from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Petronio calls I Drink the Air Before Me, "a pure dance dissertation inspired by weather." This full-length work came about in the wake of Bloom, a dance set to the music of Rufus Wainwright that Dance Umbrella presented in 2006 and again in 2008. "I am stridently a maker of movement that is related to the conceptual," says Petronio. "Bloom was hopeful, luminous and filled with light. I felt something dark and brooding should follow it."

As so he and his crack company of dancers turned their considerable talents to the unpredictable, powerful and often thrillingly turbulent forces that make up the atmosphere of our planet, from polar ice caps melting to Hurricane Katrina and more. "The audience isn't going to get wet in the theatre," Petronio explains. "I just wanted to make a link to the instability of the natural elements we take for granted."

In creating I Drink the Air Before Me, Petronio initially had the dancers trace weather patterns on the floor of the rehearsal studio. "The models we used to invent motion were weather maps and storm images taken from photographs and films. The idea of cold and hot fronts colliding became internalised. There was lots of whirling, spiraling and howling, first within the body and then out in space."

As a hot-shot young dancer, Petronio made his name as a member of Trisha Brown's company. (Interestingly, Brown is the star attraction of this year's Dance Umbrella.) "As a choreographer," he says, "my reputation and career were built in Europe after Dance Umbrella launched me in London in the 1980s. It's tougher now than it was then, and money's tight. But what did I do when the recession hit? Expanded my company to 11 dancers. Why? Because if you shrink back in the hardest of times you can simply disappear."

Although Petronio's work has mellowed as he has aged (he's now 54), it has never lost its innate kinetic intelligence or edgy craft. His whiplash signature style is evident in the dancers' wheeling arms and legs, or the tug and thrust of glancing encounters marked by the sensual tossing of a head or a battery of swift punctuating jumps. "My movement language is complicated and challenging," he says. "I think dancers want to be part of that genetic strain." What he requires of them in return is "a mobile energy in the body, and a mobile imagination. I don't just tell them what to do, so the work is not automaton. It's about individuality. Although we're all speaking the same language, everybody has different skills. I try to egg that out of people."

In the past, Petronio has collaborated with the iconic composer-performers Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, and high-profile visual artists like Cindy Sherman and Anish Kapoor, not to mention an intense personal and professional liaison with the dancer-choreographer Michael Clark. To this list can be added the name Nico Muhly, an almost frighteningly versatile young composer whose live original score for I Drink the Air Before Me includes acoustic instruments, electronic landscapes and voice. Also collaborating are the master lighting and visual designer Ken Tabachnik, a Petronio regular, and the New York menswear designer Adam Kimmel, whose costumes either suggest variations on weather gear or contain nautical stripes.

But it was Sherman, in her third collaboration with Petronio, who devised a special costume for him. "I've been doing Alfred Hitchcock appearances in my dances for a long time now," he says. "But the kind of dancing that I'm making for my company is very different from what my own body now wants to do. So much of my thing has been about being fast and young, and I don't feel the need to spend the rest of my life pursuing the impossible."

In I Drink the Air Before Me, Petronio is actually the pre-show entertainment, cast as a kind of salty old man of the sea. "I'm inhabiting the space when the house opens," he elaborates, "so anyone who gets there early has to deal with me."

© Donald Hutera, 2011