Stephen Petronio Company.

SEPTEMBER 23-28, 1997 REVIEWED BY DORIS HERING

The past four years have brought change for Stephen Petronio--positive, perhaps even liberating change. Unbearably loud rock music, sequined jack straps, oleaginous squirming, and unintelligible verbiage were the fare in his 1993 repertory.

Now the vulgarity has seemingly been tamed. There is more seriousness and more sensitivity. The music for Drawn That Way was still amplified as though ears had gone out of style, but Petronio is beginning to realize that choreography is about dancing and not about titillation.

Created last year, Drawn That Way was the strongest of the three works presented. Danced to Andy Teirstein's Rhapsody for Boy Soprano and Strings, it had a flume-like pulse and drive. The relentless continuity was sustained by an intricate and well-disciplined contrapuntal form.

After a while, however, monotony invaded both score and choreography. The dancers kept repeating a spiral that began or ended with a toss of the head. It desperately needed further development, especially in the arms, which Petronio used in a stiff windmill manner reminiscent of Merce Cunningham.

I have often had the impression that Petronio selects highly idiosyncratic music but then doesn't really listen to it. He also plays recorded music during the intermissions. It's as intrusive as Eliot Feld's device of keeping the curtains open.

A plaintive violin melody, sounding like a sea siren in the rain, provided the atmosphere for I Kneel Down Before You, a solo that Petronio created for himself and which premiered at the Joyce. The shapes he devised, the balled fists, the awkwardly curving hips and shoulders, the arbitrary contractions with head forced back, suggested dry torment where gentle melancholy might well have reigned.

At the outset of ReBourne, also a premiere, both majesty and drama were suggested by the parting of the black velvet background drapes to reveal a stage-high column of light. There was a touch of the exotic in the leatherlike costumes with wisps of fabric floating from the shoulders (by Paul Compitus). But the movement that had seemed a breakthrough in Drawn That Way here became repetitive, despite the eclecticism of throat vocalizing by Tibetan monks, the Beastie Boys, droning by Sheila Chandra, and jazz interludes. At some performances the two sections of ReBourne were reversed, so that the work began with the brightly colored Part Two and ended with the more somber Part One.

Petronio's eight-member company, led by Kristen Borg, is impressive. It is also ready for a more consistently varied kinetic challenge.