Stephen Petronio Company
That sentiment is one of the inspirations for Lareigne, Stephen Petronio said in an audience discussion after a performance at the Dance Center. He also said that the title is a pun suggesting that after a reign of heroes will come a reign of heroines.
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But the superman style of hero died sometime during the 1960s or 1970s, and a new kind of hero emerged from Joseph Campbell’s work on myths. Campbell’s hero is snatched from a normal life and forced to undergo a series of trials, then finds some treasure and returns to enrich his society with it. Campbell’s redemptive hero is far more interesting than a superman. An alcoholic penetrating the labyrinth of his denial to find the treasure of the fact of his addiction, then returning to his society a changed man–that’s a hero’s journey.
Petronio’s dancers face the common dilemma of contemporary artists–the task of producing exquisite work while being paid less than minimum wage. They exemplify the deep social division between a mainstream TV culture and an arts counterculture. The fine arts in America today are less high art than contra-art, its practitioners marginalized rebels rather than exalted leaders. The best popular image of this kind of hero is Luke Skywalker, an orphan boy from an obscure place who falls in with a ragtag band of misfits on a dilapidated spaceship but somehow becomes part of a rebel force destroying institutionalized evil: the black mask of the corporation.
The only dance escaping this fate is Middlesex Gorge, which has a sort of narrative. Dancers isolated at first form couples, then a large group that swings each member in turn into the air. The throbbing chorus in Wire’s commissioned music–“ambitious…ambitious”–suddenly makes sense of the dance as a story: a group of competitive friends have joined together to launch each person by turn onto the arc of their ambition. I suddenly saw in them the groups of traders hanging out at the bars near the Board of Trade on Friday nights.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Beatriz Schiller.
