This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
The Stephen Petronio Company will present a three-part evening of dance that includes original music by iconoclastic composer Laurie Anderson 8 p.m. tonight at the Williams Center for the Arts.
Tickets for the public cost $18 and may be purchased by calling the Williams Center box office at 610-330-5009.
Petronio will give a talk for theater students about the elements of composition, image creation, and dramatic texture in the making of dance and in the visual arts 1:15-2:30 p.m. Thursday in the Williams Center gallery.
He has spoken with Lafayette visual arts students and high school students involved in the College’s Community-Based Teaching Program based at the Williams Visual Arts Building and gave a brown bag talk noon yesterday in Williams Center room 108. In addition, Petronio Company dancers gave master classes yesterday at Lehigh Valley Charter School for the Performing Arts in Bethlehem.
The Petronio residency kicks off Lafayette’s biennial Theodore Roethke Humanities Festival, which this year focuses on performance art. The schedule includes a concert by New York’s cutting-edge brass group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, March 23; a lecture by noted NYU scholar and critic RoseLee Goldberg, March 31; a performance by the Bronx-based Universes Ensemble, April 15; and a festival keynote presentation by Anderson, Lafayette’s Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Visiting Lecturer, April 16.
All presentations start 8 p.m. at the Williams Center for the Arts. As part of the festival, the Williams Center gallery will host an installation by visionary artist Meredith Monk, Archeology of an Artist 2, from March 22-May 7.
Tickets are required for Meridian Arts Ensemble ($18) and Laurie Anderson (free, available Thursday, April 1). No tickets are required for the Goldberg lecture, Universes performance, or Monk exhibition.
The three dance pieces that Stephen Petronio Company will perform are City of Twist, an urban vision of resolute courage, inspired by the experiences of Sept. 11, with original music by Laurie Anderson; Island of Misfit Toys, conceived as a companion work, with music by experimental rock icon Lou Reed and set design by renowned set designer Cindy Sherman; and Broken Man, a new solo for Petronio himself, informed by lyrical shape, sculptural strength, and musical flow.
“Petronio has become increasingly proficient at creating sensual and intricate movement, an eccentric hybrid of the ballet and modern dance vocabularies,” states TheNew York Times. “Usually taking an architectural model as inspiration, he explores its possibilities in a high-speed, quirky, aggressive style.”
“He is clearly a creative dance maker capable of sustaining a well-structured, breathtakingly breakneck work of virtuoso movement,” writes The Chicago Tribune. “This is one hot choreographer with one sensational company.” TheSan Francisco Examiner calls Petronio “the most fearlessly inventive dancer-choreographer of his generation.”
“They fall into embraces, assist one another, make gestures that hint at emotions,” says the Village Voice of City of Twist. “But always they dance, as if their lives depended on it, as if even while connections sever and structures spin apart, this world’s fragments carry the DNA of wholeness.”
Born in Newark, N.J., Petronio received a B.A. from HampshireCollege in Amherst, Mass., where hebegan dancing in 1974. He was attracted to dance through the examples of Rudolf Nureyev and Steve Paxton and became the firstmale dancer of the Trisha Brown Company in 1979. Since founding his own company in 1984, he has receivedinternational acclaim for his groundbreaking choreography and the company has touredextensively across the United States, Canada,Europe, South America, and Russia. Overall, it has performed in 22 countries.
Petronio has collaborated with artists such as Wire,Yoko Ono, Beastie Boys, Diamanda Galás, Sheila Chandra, Cindy Sherman, Donald Baechler, Stephen Hannock, Justin Terzi, Leigh Bowery, Paul Compitus, Manolo, and Tanya Sarne of Ghost. In April 1998, he premiered his first evening-length work, Not Garden, at San Francisco’s Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens. Last spring, Petronio created another full evening-length work, Underland, for Sydney DanceCompany, which will befollowed bycommissions in Sweden, Denmark, France, and England through 2005.
Petronio has been awarded choreography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985-88, and company grants from the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts since 1988. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts award, the first American Choreographers award in 1987, and a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for his dance Walk-In in 1986. Past commissions for companies including William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet (1987), the Tulsa Opera (1990), the Deutsche Opera Berlin (1992), the Lyon Opera Ballet (1994), the Maggio Danza Florence (1996), and the Ricochet Dance Company of London (1998).
Stephen Petronio Company’s residency at Lafayette is made possible by a touring grant from the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with lead funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
The nationally recognized Performance Series attracts more than 10,000 people each season. It has been cited for performing excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, Chamber Music America, Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, Pennsylvania Arts and Humanities Councils, and Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
The 2003-04 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by the F.M. Kirby Foundation; by provisions of the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, and New England Foundation for the Arts.