Not Quite Gender Neutral

Dance

By VALERIE GLADSTONE
March 24, 2008

Choreographer Stephen Petronio's "This is the Story of a Girl in a World," despite its title's gender-specificity, might just apply to Mr. Petronio himself.

Indeed, the choreographer, whose eponymous company begins its season at the Joyce Theater April 1, is noted for his impressive insight into women's lives and his ability to translate that understanding into movement. In the dance department at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, he was surrounded by women.

When he graduated, he joined the all-female Trisha Brown Dance Company, where he "felt like a bull in a china shop." Mr. Petronio quickly picked up what he described as Ms. Brown's "amazing, slippery, serpentine, sequential movement" over his seven years with her troupe. Once he established his own company in 1984, he added a macho attack to the sensuousness learned from Ms. Brown. "I call it femininity on steroids," he said.

Mr. Petronio is now devoting even greater attention to the opposite gender. One of the new sections of the five-part "This is the Story of a Girl in a World" that is danced in silence celebrates women choreographers and burlesque queens in a series of images that he garnered from photographs of legends such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Josephine Baker, and Pina Bausch, as well performance artists such as Karen Finley, Candy Darling, and Annie Sprinkle. "I wanted to pay homage to them — women who shake their butts and their brains for us to learn from," he said.

"Men get all the breaks. This is a gift to women, and especially to my dancers." The new, eloquent, and witty works show him exploring what he refers to as "femaleness." "I'm very interested in how people perceive it," he said. "I like to look at how it develops, and in some cases, manifests itself in cartoonish stereotypes."

The 52-year-old Mr. Petronio and his eight-member troupe will offer the sexy "Beauty and the Brut" and the final three sections of the touching "This is the Story of a Girl in a World." The program will also include the tender "Bloom" to songs by Rufus Wainwright, with the live accompaniment of the Young People's Chorus of New York City.

As the group completed a run-through of "Beauty and the Brut" in a SoHo studio recently, a dancer turned on the stereo, and the score by the band Fischerspooner set in motion one of Mr. Petronio's funkiest dances to date. The stately dancer Shila Tirabassi, taking a position center stage, stretched and sighed, moving her hands over her body provocatively as the female vocalist described a man's louche advances. Though the subject of the song is put off by the man's crudeness at first, she eventually gives in to the man, at which point in the piece the three male dancers launched into a dynamic trio simmering with violence.

"I was particularly interested in the cartoonishness of the gender portrayal in the score's story and the truth that it reflects about many sexual encounters," Mr. Petronio said. "In such circumstances, how often when you are confronted by the expression of animal instinct, are you reminded of your own nature? I made cultured, pretty, sophisticated, and slick female movement for the woman in the first part and then when she gets turned on by the guy, movement more in keeping with her blunt response."

Watching Davalois Fearon spin across the studio at breakneck speed in "For Today I am a Boy," a section of "This is the Story of a Girl in a World" set to a melancholy song by Antony, one wonders how a dancer of any age handles Mr. Petronio's fierce, quicksilver choreography.

What helps his dancers master his demanding style is that he gives them the freedom to play around with the movement until it fits them. "Stephen instinctively captures women's sensuality," Ms. Tirabassi said. "He knows how to make phrases that convey our sexiness, our strength, and our delicacy. He taps into the things that we're good at, without giving up what he wants to create. If he only presented us as strong, we'd simply look athletic. His work always has more than one dimension."