A little more than 40 years after its founding, the Stephen Petronio Company is disbanding, it announced on Wednesday. The dance troupe will have its final performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in July.
“It’s been a wild, beautiful ride,” Petronio, 68, said in a phone interview. “This is the Year of Snake, and it’s time to shed what doesn’t work anymore and move forward.”
What doesn’t work anymore, Petronio said, is what he has been doing for decades: sustaining a company of dancers through touring and grants. “There wasn’t enough work for the dancers,” he said. “The people that had presented us were beginning to disappear, and the funding for those presenters was beginning to shift.”
The breakdown of what is sometimes called “the company model” has been happening for many years, but it was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and, in response to the murder of George Floyd, a displacement of dance funding into social justice projects.
“A lot of company leaders decided this well before I did,” Petronio said. “I was determined to ride it as long as possible.”
When Petronio founded the company in 1984, he did so in a very different cultural environment. The first male member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, he was following a tradition of branching off on his own, extending a lineage. He developed his own movement style: complex and erotic, well-crafted yet unpredictable. (In his 2014 memoir, “Confessions of a Motion Addict,” he called himself “a formalist with a dirty mind.”) And he became known for collaborations with celebrities from the worlds of art, music and fashion, like Cindy Sherman, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Tara Subkoff/Imitation of Christ.
In a 2010 New York Times review of one of his company’s 25 seasons at the Joyce Theater, Roslyn Sulcas called Petronio “one of the few contemporary choreographers to have created an instantly recognizable style and also a substantial oeuvre.”
By 2014 Petronio wanted to expand, so he created the Bloodlines project, reviving work by choreographers he saw as his artistic forebears: Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton and others. An offshoot project, Bloodlines (future), supported up-and-coming choreographers. In 2017, the company turned a 175-acre property in the Catskills into the Petronio Residency Center, a place for it and others to rehearse.
Then came the pandemic. “Actually, we weathered the pandemic pretty well,” Petronio said. “I kept the dancers working.” But he exhausted himself, only to emerge from the pandemic and discover that many foundations had decided to focus on social justice (“which of course I support 100 percent,” he said) instead of supporting companies like his. The troupe ran out of money.
Selling the Catskills property in December provided the company with sufficient funds to clear its debt and pay for a few final projects. (The 77-acre nature preserve that the company established with the Doris Duke Foundation will remain untouched.) A valedictory series of performances, bringing back repertory, will culminate at Jacob’s Pillow in July. The next project is an extension of Bloodlines (future): around $500,000 to establish a fund to provide young choreographers with financial support. The company is also creating a digital archive of Petronio’s work, hoping other companies will want to license it.
Petronio himself is not done. “I’m not retiring,” he said. “I’m looking forward to figuring out another way to continue making work.”
“I always think I’m invincible,” he added. “I always think, ‘I can pull this off,’ and I always have. But the world changed.”
