Stephen Petronio Company: American Dance Festival

Program: Stephen Petronio’s Locomotor, Merce Cunningham’s RainForest, and Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy.

Stephen Petronio Company will present three works as a part of Bloodlines, a five-year project that incorporates dances by trailblazers of American postmodern dance into the company’s repertory and presents them alongside new works by Stephen Petronio. Merce Cunningham’s RainForest (1968), a spare and bracing foray into animal abstract motion and sound, set loose amidst a world of floating silver pillows, features an electronic score composed by David Tudor performed live each evening, with visual design by Andy Warhol. Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy (1979), her first work for the proscenium stage, plays with theatrical convention. Glacial Decoy> features iconic projections depicting classic Americana and billowing white costumes by Robert Rauschenberg and is the first of many Brown/Rauschenberg collaborations. Petronio’s Locomotor (2014) addresses the elemental act of bodies traveling—extreme locomotive states that cast the dancers in a careening mix of action forward and backward through time and space. Locomotor features an original score by electronic pioneer Clams Casino, lighting design by Petronio’s longtime collaborator Ken Tabachnick, and costumes by Narciso Rodriguez, one of America’s foremost designers.