Stephen Petronio Company.

Stephen Petronio Company The Joyce Theater, NYC April 18-23, 2006

Stephen Petronio's choreography braids together awkward and sophisticated movement. It can be kinetically exciting or only puzzling. This concert went from good to better to best.

Bud Suite, with music by Rufus Wainwright and costumes by Tara Subkoff, was stylish and cool. The dancers looked like figures out of Robert Longo paintings in the '80s of well-dressed people dancing at a party--sexy and wasted. Bud has Petronio's trademark inside-out movement: whipping arms, twisting torsos, and nifty ways to leverage. In the opening duet, two men, as close as packed sardines, engage in lifts that end in a lilt or a thud. Occasionally a hand touches the nape of a neck. The dancing projects a druggy sexuality: physical neediness but also indifference.

Bloom, a premiere, is more symmetrical, softer, with longer lines. If it's about the first bloom of youth, then the teenagers from Young People's Chorus of NYC embodied it more than the dancers. About 40 fresh-faced chorus members walked up the aisle and upstairs to stand on the left balcony. Their tender voices ringing out, their eyes fixed on their terrific conductor, Francisco J. Nunez (who also was choral arranger), clear across the space on the right balcony, they provided a touching contrast to the busy dancers onstage. Wainwright had set poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson to the vocals, backed by a layer of recorded singing. Precise rhythmic oddness marked both the music and the choreography. The last line, "Hope is the thing with feathers," uttered and danced with no sentimentality, ended Bloom on a high.

The final piece, The Rite Part, is an excerpt from the excellent Full Half Wrong of 1992. Taking his cue from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which accompanied the first and last solos), Petronio's dancers moved lower to the earth, savage. The opening solo recalled a dog hunching its back or a baby crunching its toes. In the group work, heads heaved wildly off to the side, the rest of the body dragging along. The dancers bent forward, perhaps determined to plant their seeds, arms thrust behind them, moving within a stark architecture of bodies and light (all lighting design by Ken Tabachnick).

The Rite Part ended with a magnificent solo in which Shila Tirabassi seemed to evolve from a fish to a sheet of metal, bending and twisting in impolite ways. Rarely have I seen an American choreographer meet Stravinsky with such force and dark beauty. See www.stephenpetronio.com.