The Stephen Petronio Company Gives Final Performances After 40+ Years
Stephen Petronio 74F, a renowned dancer, choreographer, and collaborator, has been the artistic director of the Stephen Petronio Company for more than four decades. This month, the company wraps up its final season with a series of performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
Hampshire College alum Stephen Petronio 74F has been called “one of the few contemporary choreographers to have created an instantly recognizable style and also a substantial oeuvre.” His career is one of both innovation and carrying on a rich and complex dance legacy. When he founded the Stephen Petronio Company, in 1984, it “quickly gained recognition for its bold and visually stunning performances that combined elements of modern, ballet, and postmodern dance,” according to the Stephen Petronio Company website.
Now, the company has announced that it will disband. Its final performances will take place at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival on July 23–27 in Becket, Massachusetts. In a February interview with The New York Times, Petronio noted that, post-pandemic, many of the foundations that used to support the company decided to focus on funding social justice initiatives (“which of course I support 100 percent,” he said), and the company has run out of money. Petronio, however, is not retiring. “I’m looking forward to figuring out another way to continue making work,” he says. “It’s been a wild, beautiful ride. This is the Year of the Snake, and it’s time to shed what doesn’t work anymore and move forward.”
Being a beginner in those first classes at Hampshire, Smith, UMass, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke afforded me certain power, the power of no expectation, the fool who can learn freely and unencumbered by what I know.
Per the Jacob’s Pillow website, the final Stephen Petronio Company (SPC) performances “will include Chair Pillow by Yvonne Rainer as well as some of Petronio’s signature works, such as MiddleSexGorge (1990), BUD (2005), Broken Man (2002), the critically acclaimed American Landscapes (2019), and a new iteration of Petronio’s solo Another Kind of Steve (2024). This appearance comes exactly 40 years after the company’s Pillow debut in the first of three consecutive seasons when they were Artists-in-Residence here.”
In 2015, Petronio reflected on his local history after the company performed at the UMass Fine Arts Center: “It was here that I began my dancing life. Hampshire College (Fall 74) was the school I chose, and Improvisation with Francia McClellan (now Tara Stepenberg) was the first ever class that split open another eternal world — a somatic present.” He contemplated what it meant to come back to where it all began, writing, “In Amherst, I return the victorious artist, but remain ever the child . . . Being a beginner in those first classes at Hampshire, Smith, UMass, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke afforded me certain power, the power of no expectation, the fool who can learn freely and unencumbered by what I know.”
Over four decades, the company performed in more than 40 countries, with numerous commissions and engagements, among them 25 seasons at The Joyce Theater of New York. Petronio has received many honors, such as a New York Performance Award (Bessie), an American Choreographers Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2017 McCormack Visiting Artists-Scholar Residency at Skidmore College. He has collaborated with a wide variety of artists and musicians — Cindy Sherman, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright, Patricia Field/Iris Bohnner, and Leigh Bowery, for example — and the choreographers Anna Halperin, Michael Clark, and Johnnie Cruz Mercer.
In 2014, he developed the project Bloodlines, “to honor the experimental . . . pioneers that have inspired him” and went on to found Bloodlines(future), “to support a new generation of dancers and choreographers more equitably in this artistic lineage,” per the SPC site. He also founded the Stephen Petronio Residency Center (2017–23), “a research and development facility that provided rare support for artists and their personal creative growth in nature and without restriction.” Petronio writes on his website, “This has been an incredible 40 years building worlds with some of the most talented dancers, musicians, visual artists, and designers on the planet. I couldn’t be prouder of this history, and I look forward to more creation through new modes of delivering that work.”
Photo by Sarah Silver
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