At Jacob's Pillow, the Stephen Petronio Company takes a farewell bow

Boston Globe

4 days ago

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"MiddleSexGorge" by Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025.
Jamie Kraus Photography
Later in the program, it was 'MiddleSexGorge,' from 1992, Petronio's acclaimed choreographic response to the AIDS crisis. The signature partnering is never a gesture; it is a full surrender of a person's weight into the arms of the company that supports him. The way the dancers touch, lift, and lean on one another becomes a radical display of community.
But the dance that hit hardest Sunday afternoon was Petronio's solo, 'Another Kind of Steve,' in which the choreographer rolled his neck and swung his arms through a conversational monologue that celebrated his queerness, lamented the fall of Western civilization, and expressed excitement about vanishing alongside his dances.
'The most delicious thing in the world is to disappear,' Petronio proclaimed, 'and I'm about to get my wish!'
Stephen Petronio in "Chair-Pillow" by Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025.
Jamie Kraus Photography
When a choreographer of Petronio's stature
sunsets his company, dance feels more ephemeral than ever. But that is part of the power of dance; that it is fleeting, just like life.
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Petronio decided to close his company partially because he is getting older (age 69, he informed the audience with a wink), but also because the outlook on funding for dance and the arts is more bleak than ever and the full-time company model has become too expensive to maintain.
In an interview after the curtain closed, Norton Owen, the Pillow's director of preservation, said there was no better place for the company's final shows — because it's a site that has witnessed the passage of dance history and celebrated it through careful documentation and archival maintenance.
'The fact that they no longer exist as a company doesn't mean that they are now invisible,' he said, referencing the Pillow's archive. 'It just means that there are certain pockets of places where you can find things, and this is going to be one of them.'
For former Petronio company dancer turned choreographic assistant Gerald Casel, the archive of Petronio's work lives on in Casel's muscles.
'It's so deeply, kinesthetically, part of my memory of being in the company,' Casel said in an interview just before the final show, 'I still feel so connected to the material I can teach [it] by heart without looking at [a] video.'
Casel, a scholar, educator, and accomplished choreographer in his own right, performed with Petronio for 11 (non-consecutive) years beginning in 1991. Since then, he has become a custodian of Petronio's choreography, reconstructing the work for numerous companies and schools across the globe, including the Petronio Company's latest remounting of 'MiddleSexGorge.'
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Stephen Petronio in "Another Kind of Steve" by Stephen Petronio Company at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025.
Jamie Kraus Photography
For Casel, restaging 'MSG' is not just about passing on historic movement patterns to the next generation, 'We have to remind them … what was happening in our culture at the time, the weather around the AIDS epidemic, and refusal of the government to provide research for medication for HIV.'
Petronio is deeply situated in American dance history; he studied with Steve Paxton, the founder of contact improv, and made his Pillow debut as the first male dancer with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, in 1980.
Petronio exposes Brown's influence in the flop of an arm, and the compositional strategies he employs — establishing a movement phrase that inverts, morphs, fractures, and returns to its original form. With these citations of Brown's legacy, and the inclusion of Rainer's choreography in the closing program, Petronio blows a kiss to the past and prepares for the future.
This company may be disbanding, but the choreographer is not retiring. He plans to continue choreographing on a project-by-project basis, and has established a fund to support the work of emerging dance artists in an initiative called, Bloodlines(futures).
Casel sat at a picnic table behind the dining hall that feeds the Pillow's artists and staff, and recounted his Sunday morning; 'I gave a warm-up class; Stephen led a roll down.' He recalled rehearsal director Gino Grenek's words to the dancers; 'This is just like every other day. There's the choreography, that's all you need to do.'
While it is bittersweet to watch such a highly influential company end its performance career, this is part of the cycle of dance history. There is an ordinariness to it; dance is always ephemeral, companies close — so it goes.
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THE STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY
At the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. July 27.
Sarah Knight can be reached at [e-mail].