The Reflex

Tonight, the choice between an advance screening of You Got Served (wherein B2K dance head-to-head with the drummer from Blink 182) and Stephen Petronio Dance Company broke me out in pins and needles. On 95.5*, DJ Juggernaut reported that You Got Served “has a plot, but you don’t even notice it, because there’s so much dancing.” AKA MY IDEA OF A PERFECT MOVIE. But Stephen Petronio won out in the end, mostly because the You Got Served trailer was excruciating, even considering my admittedly sub-low standards for urban dance films.
Stephen Petronio himself is a 1972 graduate of Hampshire College, and while tending goats and reading Foucault, or whatever it is they do at HC, he familiarized himself with Laurie Anderson, Wire, Beastie Boys, Diamanda Galas, and James Lavelle, and uses their music in his productions. While this is not as exciting as the Janet Pants Dans Theeeatre choreographing a piece to Numbers, it’s still better than expected, and Petronio has been hailed for 20 years for his innovative choreography. Tonight’s performance was the American premiere of Island of the Misfit Toys: Cindy Sherman designed the set, Lou Reed wrote the music, Tara Subkoff/Imitation of Christ created the costuming: kinda future-funk, but then not that future at all. In City of Twist, Petronio’s 2002 paean to a post-9/11 NYC, his choreography is full-on classicist, severely rooted in the ceremony of ballet. His motion’s got flow, and makes use of every last stretch of sinew in his dancers’ bodies, melting them gummily into the floor, tendon by tendon. But after the air was halved by the thousandth arabesque and pas de bourre and grand jete, I got the point: Petronio is in love with form (bodies, motion); his style of choreography is aesthetic, first; and during what should have been a heavily emotional piece—or at least a representational one—his modus operandi was quite simply only-beautiful. I love beauty, but a half-hour of amorphously subtexted beauty doesn’t provoke or edify. It just looks beautiful.
On the other hand, his method of combating balletic formalism is by putting his seven dancers in clusters of two or three, shaping their steps with a vague, almost messy confluence, and leaving it all for the audience to untangle. (Imagine Swan Lake at a house party.) While City of Twist was neither interpretive nor explicit, Petronio redeemed it a bit in the last movement, with a solo dancer, alternately clenching and pirouetting against a twinkly white-light scene of NYC skyline, costumed in a jersey t-shirt shredded to look like a flapper dress, so that everytime she moved, loose swathes of fringe followed.
This is all beside the fact that he based City on post-9/11 NYC—an impossible topic for the most obvious reasons—and its subsequent squeeze on the milk-teet by every jingoistic hitchhiker in the hemisphere. The only 9/11 tribute I’ve seen that worked, ever, was by the Japanese performance-art duo Eiko and Koma, who painted their bodies white and spent an hour barely moving and occasionally twitching in the frigid waters of the Jamison Park fountain.
The newer piece, Island of Misfit Toys was better (in other words, more challenging), but Petronio, deriving some of that herky-jerky twitch stuff from either himself, or the new trends in avant-choreography (see: Janet Pants), even still directed his dancers in strokes of graceful ballonne: Julliard to the max. Cindy Sherman’s set included an eight-foot-tall, porcelain-esque doll with the face carved out, and a giant totem pole of emotionless kewpie faces, each representing varying degrees of open mouth, all blank. It began with Lou Reed’s reading of The Raven, and the ensemble dressed in pajamas, cutie-pie flounces and nightmarish toy make-up (not unlike Darryl Hannah’s character in Blade Runner: swipes of raccoon black, with neon spheres of blush). It was a procession of Evil Dolls and Misfit Toys, dancing like rag dolls with dance degrees.
At one point, while the Reed monologue became the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man,” a pigtailed misfit toy broke out of her lyrical ballet, look-at-my-awesomely-long-limbs mode and actually performed the Roger Rabbit. It was my favorite part of the night… which I think means I should have gone to You Got Served.
* 95.5 is Portland’s only mainstream hiphop station, where, despite being owned by Paul Allen and not Clear Channel, they have only recently begun airing Twista’s “Slow Jamz” and R. Kelly’s “Step in the Name of Love.” Just now, after playing “Change Clothes,” the DJ (not Juggernaut) attempted to explain the greatness of The Grey Album; she said she loves it, but she thought it was by someone like, “um.. DJ Danger, or something like that?” THIS IS NOT OKAY. Then again, it’s my personal theory Paul Allen bought 95.5 in order to promote the Blazers (which he also owns, and to whose games you may now purchase tickets for like, a dollar thirty.)
** (DJ Juggernaut also informed us that Ray J, Brandy’s brother, is now the ringleader of B2K.)