ABSTRACT
Stephen Petronio makes dances that are aggressive, stylish, athletic, and highly sexed. His choreography surges with urban speed and power, but the individual movements are often both quirky and oddly juxtaposed. Unexpected tics and pauses texture and gnarl the rhythms of his hard-driving works. The distinctiveness of Petroñio’s choreography owes a great deal to his own idiosyncratic movement style, a connection that is immediately apparent when the tall, muscular choreographer dances. He has a loose-limbed ease in awkward step combinations, an unusual fluidity that the Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt calls a ‘slippery grace’.1 He is a prodigiously talented performer, as are the nine dancers of the Stephen Petronio Company, who plunge headlong into his vernacular with the abandon of native speakers.
