In the first half of Stephen Petronio’s Underland – seen Saturday at Alverno Presents – it’s hard to tell exactly how many dancers are in the company. Petronio brings his dancers to and from the stage so seamlessly that it seems like you’re slowly panning across a vast crowd scene. Groups dancing different unison phrases mix and intermingle as they move across the stage, and its done with such precision that it sometimes seems like a slight-of-hand card trick: “Wait, there were three in that group and now it’s a pair!”
Since it’s danced to the darkly evocative music of Nick Cave, it’s hardly a party game. And Petronio’s stringent and taut movement keeps you on edge, wondering if a whipped lower limb is going to make bruising contact with a passing body. It’s a mesmerizing 20-minutes.
While the rest of Underland doesn’t quite measure up to this passage, it still display’s Petronio’s dazzling inventiveness and his company’s physical prowess. There’s a thrillingly fierce duet (Barrington Hinds and Natalie Mackessy) set to the cynical murder ballad “Stagger Lee.” A quiet but polymorphously perverse quartet with a standing slab of dancers that grope for affection in ways both touchingly desperate and robotic. And a long sequence (“The Carney”) takes Cave’s music to its Brechtian Tom Waits extremes – a dance circus that included Amanda Wells’ loose-limbed stoned-out Coppelia.
Petronio has said that Underland isn’t narrative, but even with the absence of Mike Daly’s video projections (which included mushroom clouds and other symbols of destruction), it’s hard not to make real world connections between the piece’s passages of dark chaos and the later numbers in which dancers wear torn military uniforms with red chiffon “wounds” streaming from various limbs. Whether or not you read Underland as a passage from the darkness of 9/11 (the piece was originally created for the Sydney Dance Company in 2003), you can’t deny the way Petronio evokes a journey from pain to redemption with brilliant movement and images.
Photo by Sarah Silver
