Fresh moves: choreographer Stephen Petronio tells how he and Rufus Wainwright created a new dance about the beauty of growing up and discovering sexuality.Kink kink n. 1. A tight curl, twist, or bend in a length of thin material. 2. A painful muscle spasm, as in the neck; a crick. 3. A mental peculiarity; a quirk. 4. and violence gang up to hog the spotlight in much of Stephen Petronio's choreography. "I was feeling ghettoized by what was expected of me," says Petronio, who emerged as the subversive "bad boy" of New York's downtown art scene at the height of the ACT UP era. "I feel like it's such a limitation to only play to one side of my sexuality." So he decided to shine some light into the darkness by commissioning out crooner Rufus Wainwright to write an original score for his choreography. The collaboration, titled Bloom, premieres at the Joyce Theater The Joyce Theater is a 472-seat dance performance venue located in the Chelsea area of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The Joyce Theater Foundation, the organization founded in 1982 that operates the theater, also owns the Joyce SoHo dance center located in a in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. on April 18. Petronio asked Wainwright to compose something that swoons and swells with young love. "Adolescents, despite what a lot of people believe, are sexual," says the gay choreographer. "I wanted the smell of youth the transition from youth to adult. That moment of transformation is the inspiration." Aptly, the piece will be sung by 44 members of the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Wainwright and Petronio settled on three poems--two by Walt Whitman, one by Emily Dickinson--to lend a lyrical voice to the layered melodies of Bloom's six sections. All involve planting, growing, becoming an individual. Whitman's "Unseen Buds" speaks of the ongoing potential of germination germination, in a seed, process by which the plant embryo within the seed resumes growth after a period of dormancy and the seedling emerges. The length of dormancy varies; the seed of some plants (e.g. ; "One's-Self I Sing" celebrates the act of claiming individuality. Dickinson's famous "Hope" praises the trustworthiness of that virtue. "These poems say what it means to be democratic and responsible in the world and to be conscious of other people," says Petronio. "The floral analogy is about growing as a person." Petronio's dancers match the music's fugue-like architectural structure An architectural structure is a free-standing, immobile outdoor construction. The structure may be permanent. Typical examples include buildings and nonbuilding structures such as bridges, dams, electricity pylons, and radio masts. with sensual physicality. Sharing the program with the premiere are Bud Suite, a sexy duet for two men set to Wainwright's operatic "Oh What a World," and The Rite Part, a portion of an earlier Petronio work called Full Half Wrong, based on Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. As for the rite of collaboration with Wainwright (whose artistic capital seems to be growing hourly), Petronio is thrilled. "The right spirit jumps on the right thing at the right time," he says. Carman Car´man n. 1. A man whose employment is to drive, or to convey goods in, a car or car. also writes for The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times. |
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