The title of Stephen Petronio’s 2014 memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict, spells it out: The highly influential choreographer is not comfortable standing still. Which means that hitting the stop button on the Stephen Petronio Company, the world-renowned dance troupe he founded just over 40 years ago, wasn’t an easy decision for the 69-year-old, who with his associates in late 2024 made the hard choice to disband the company. The shuttering, Petronio explains, is mainly due to three developments: the recent, commendable reprioritizing of public grants toward social-justice projects; the crippling economic impact of the pandemic on live touring performances; and the predicted assaults by the current administration on arts funding. “[The closure] is definitely bittersweet,” says Petronio. “But when we were coming to that decision, it felt instinctively like the right thing to do. And then, when I put it into action, it was a hellacious feeling, to actually begin to talk about it.”
The Stephen Petronio Company has performed in more than 40 countries and frequently in New York City, where the ensemble appeared for 25 seasons at the historic Joyce Theater. The company has been recognized for its courageously innovative and visually astonishing performances, which have combined modern, ballet, and postmodern dance styles, as well as its tradition-challenging concepts of movement, which have explored notions of gender, identity, and sexuality. Petronio, the recipient of numerous awards and grants that include a 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship, the first American Choreographer Award in 1987, and a 1986 New York Dance and Performance Award (AKA the Bessie), has created dances for the Frankfurt Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and other prominent companies. The lengthy list of visual artists, composers, designers, and musicians he’s collaborated with includes Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, Wire, Rufus Wainwright, the Beastie Boys, Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor, Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, Diamanda Galas, Robert Longo, Stephen Hannock, Fischerspooner, Teresita Fernandez, Janine Antoni, Mostah Black and David Linton, Narciso Rodriguez, Tara Subkoff, and Patricia Field, as well as fellow choreographers like Anna Halperin and Michael Clark.
Thunderstruck
Petronio grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, about 14 miles outside of Manhattan. “It seemed like it was light years away from New York,” he recalls. “It was a very Jewish and Italian area, and my parents were very conservative Italian-American Catholic. There was no art in the household, really. But when I was a kid they took me to see ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ when Zero Mostel was in it, which was great. And for some reason, every couple of years, my parents and my aunts and uncles would go to [famed East Village nightclub] Club 82 to see drag shows. I guess going there was kind of their ‘walk on the wild side’ or something [laughs].”
Soon enough, though, the teenage Petronio, an avid reader, began to further connect with modes of artistic expression. “I joined the drama club in high school,” says the choreographer. “Then I started sneaking into the city on my own for things like my first concert, which was the Byrds in Central Park in the early ’70s.” But his life-changing connection with dance wouldn’t come until 1974, when he became the first in his family to attend college, enrolling at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
“I went to Hampshire with the idea of being a doctor, so I was originally in the pre-medicine program,” Petronio says. “The first week I was there, I met a girl who I danced with at some parties and she said, ‘You’re a pretty good dancer, you should take a dance class.’ So I did it, and in that class, the thunderbolt struck me. It was an improvisation class, and I just realized I had a body that I didn’t know anything about. It turned out that I have a very lucky body, I’m loose-limbed and I have gifted feet. So that really opened things up and made want to go further.” The next revelation came when he met and studied with gymnast-turned-choreographer Steve Paxton, one of the founders of the pivotal Judson Dance Theater collective and the inventor of the contact improvisation dance technique. “[Contact improvisation] is kind of a ‘sporty’ form, an ‘art sport.’ So that was my entre into thinking about developing my own language within improvisation.”
New York Groove
In 1979, Petronio moved to New York with the express aim of becoming a professional dancer. Artistically, the move paid off quickly: Within six months of his arrival, he’d become the first male dancer in the Trisha Brown Dance Company, performing with the celebrated troupe for nearly seven years. “I was part of the punk generation, and it was the ’80s in New York,” says Petronio, who was a member of the improv performance group Channel Z from 1982 to 1987. “Rap music was taking off, there was live punk rock, club life, and vibrant street art everywhere. It was the decade of excess, and the speed of everything was being turned up. So that had to happen with movement as well, and I wanted to reflect that with dance. In the ’80s I used to say that my work was ‘virtuoso-like’; I wasn’t ballet-trained, but I was attracted to virtuoso movement, and I wanted to show that with my work. I realized that I could look at ballet and steal things from it without understanding the syntax. That really freed me—all movement was fair game.”
In 1984 he broke off on his own to form the Stephen Petronio Company, which quickly gained recognition for its bold and stunning performances of its leader’s works across the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in New York and around the world. Working with Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, however, certainly cemented his New York-art credibility forever. “I met Laurie Anderson when she was working with Trisha Brown just when [Anderson’s 1981 single] ‘O Superman’ was hitting,” Petronio says. “I was making a work called ‘City of Twist’ [2002], which was in part a reaction to 9/11, and I needed music for it. I was reticent to ask her because she’d already done Set and Rest with Trisha Brown. But we’d gotten to know each other while working at BAM, and she said yes, amazingly. Later I mentioned to her how I was trying to find music for ‘The Island of Misfit Toys’ [2004], which was to be the other part of a presentation, and I asked her, ‘What other composer would you want to have your own work appear next to?’ And of course, she was married to Lou Reed. She said, ‘Why don’t you ask Lou?’ I told her that Lou scared the shit out of me [laughs]. But she arranged a meeting between us, and it ended up being great. I went to their apartment and by the end of the meeting Lou and I were sitting cross-legged on the floor, with him playing all this music from his catalog and suggesting songs to use.” With his company growing and needing more space, however, Petronio eventually cast his eyes on the Catskills.
Dance Away
In 2018, thanks in part to an initial $1 million gift from the sales of artworks by his friend and collaborator Anish Kapoor, Petronio opened the 175-acre Petronio Residency Center for dance in Round Top. Serving gourmet meals and other amenities to New York-escaping dancers and students, the center thrived for five years—and was one of a handful of arts facilities whose rural locations made them active havens during the pandemic—until the touring income that Petronio’s company had counted on to help support the site was wiped out by the eradication of touring due to Covid; the founder put the residency up for sale in 2023. And now comes the compounding heartbreak of his winding down of the company itself. But for Petronio, the closing of those chapters is by no means the end of the dance. When the administrators of nearby dance mecca Jacob’s Pillow got wind of what was happening, they invited his storied troupe to give its final performances on their Berkshires grounds.
“All of us here have such deep respect for Stephen and what he’s done over four decades with the company,” says Jacob’s Pillow’s executive director, Pamela Tatge, whose establishment has a long history of working with Stephen Petronio Dance. “Of course, we were very sad to hear about its sunsetting. And right now, with the arts and culture under attack, we felt it was especially important to present these last performances.” Over five dates in July, the farewell program will take place exactly 40 years after SPC’s Jacob’s Pillow debut and will include ‘Chair Pillow’ by Yvonne Rainer as well as some of Petronio’s signature works, including ‘MiddleSexGorge’ (1990), ‘BUD’ (2005), ‘Broken Man’ (2002), ‘American Landscapes’ (2019), and a new iteration of his solo piece ‘Another Kind of Steve’ (2024).
But for Petronio it’s by no means the end. After the last step of the last night, he plans to keep right on moving, into the next phases of dancing and life. “I’m looking forward to doing lots and lots of other projects,” he says. “At a more leisurely pace.”
Stephen Petronio Dance will give its final public performances at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts, July 23-27. Tickets start at $65.
This article appears in July 2025.
