A little more than 40 years after its founding, the Stephen Petronio Company is disbanding, it announced on Wednesday. The dance troupe will have its final performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in July.
“It’s been a wild, beautiful ride,” Petronio, 68, said in a phone interview. “This is the Year of Snake, and it’s time to shed what doesn’t work anymore and move forward.”
What doesn’t work anymore, Petronio said, is what he has been doing for decades: sustaining a company of dancers through touring and grants. “There wasn’t enough work for the dancers,” he said. “The people that had presented us were beginning to disappear, and the funding for those presenters was beginning to shift.”
The breakdown of what is sometimes called “the company model” has been happening for many years, but it was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and, in response to the murder of George Floyd, a displacement of dance funding into social justice projects.
“A lot of company leaders decided this well before I did,fef777” Petronio said. “I was determined to ride it as long as possible.”
When Petronio founded the company in 1984, he did so in a very different cultural environment. The first male member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, he was following a tradition of branching off on his own, extending a lineage. He developed his own movement style: complex and erotic, well-crafted yet unpredictable. (In his 2014 memoir, “Confessions of a Motion Addict,” he called himself “a formalist with a dirty mind.”) And he became known for collaborations with celebrities from the worlds of art, music and fashion, like Cindy Sherman, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Tara Subkoff/Imitation of Christ.
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