STEPHEN PETRONIO DANCE COMPANY.

STEPHEN PETRONIO DANCE COMPANY YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 4, 1999 REVIEWED BY RITA FELCIANO

Strange Attractors's first part was premiered at the commencement of Petronio's third year of residency in San Francisco; it is Petronio at his most familiar and also at his most unpredictable. This half-hour piece, set to a commissioned score by Michael Nyman, is designed to stand autonomously and be part of a companion piece which will premiere next year. Attractors confirms Petronio as one of the most thoughtful and lyrically inventive choreographers of his generation.

Two aspects are particularly noteworthy in Attractors, besides the rare pleasure of watching a work whose language you recognize and which yet surprises you at every richocheing leap and pitched body flying off on a tangent. One has to do with what looks like an increased use of silence and its kinetic equivalent, stasis. At the vortex of Petronio's turbulent choreography there often is a quietness not unlike what you experience while looking at a pulsating night sky pattern on my computer screen saver or from peering into pulsating cells through an electron microscope. This sense of internal focus was already evident in the lyrical Drawn That Way from 1996 which, together with the haunting solo #4, was also performed on this splendid program.

With Attractors however, it appears to have slid more to the surface. Whirling dancers keep going after Nyman's lush music stops or, in another section, they begin patterns before the score starts up again. The effect is startling, as if time had been suspended or another way of being had intruded. The sense of suspension is also created by the choreography; by the dancer who kneels and faces away from the audience in the middle of frenetic activity, by the unisons in which momentary synchronicity feels like breaths being held, or the column of dancers who look monumental as they simply stand and wait before starting a sinuous, garlanding pattern around each other.

The other intriguing element has to do with the way Petronio places Attractors into the black box that is the theater. On a stage from which the wing curtains have been removed, the ensemble performs on a darkly lit square(by Ken Tabachnick). It feels like a gym floor. Into this space, as if into new territory, leaps a single dancer (Philip Gardner). He is joined by Ashleigh Leite for a fleeting, fast-paced duet. The workaday arena then blossoms with dancer after exquisite dancer until all of a sudden, one breaks off and ambles offstage. Some others dance to the edge of the square and simply walk off while still others wait at the sidelines for their turn to dive into these starbursts of constantly reconfiguring relationships.

By juxtaposing the dancing with the ordinary body, Petronio points to the mask even as he reveals the face behind it. This performance is performance. And then about two-thirds of the way, he tops this bifurcated focus with a quasi-Wizard of Oz gesture. The light darkens and the back wall curtains pull back. Suspended in the gaping mouth of the backstage area a traffic sign tells us: "You Are Here." The dancers? The audience? For each other?