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Petronio in bloom: a daring intellect, he's been taking risks for 25 years.

Article Excerpt
Stephen Petronio set Shila Tirabassi spinning in a circle, releasing her only when she stopped abruptly and shot her back leg out in arabesque. "Perfect," he said, moving away as she turned on the diagonal, allowing space for Amanda Wells to leap forward in a series of explosive jetes. "Good, good," he cheered.

His other dancers practiced moves on the sidelines at the Joyce SoHo studio in Manhattan. They had been performing steadily for months, and, back in December, had returned from a six-week tour of England. "That's it," he called out as the women finished the vigorous sequence in a sweat. "It's beautiful."

He had just begun choreographing I Drink the Air Before Me, the evening-length dance that will mark his April season at the Joyce Theater. This year his company's 25th anniversary provides an opportunity to look back over his career as well as look forward.

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Linda Shelton, executive director of the Joyce, watched Petronio develop, starting in the 1980s. She saw him at various downtown venues in one-night performances. Now he has an annual weeklong engagement at her theater. "Stephen is one of the few choreographers with a distinctive style," she says. "I love the furious pace, his seemingly inexhaustible store of idiosyncratic steps, and wildly inventive juxtapositions of movement. There's no one like him. People ask who is the next Merce Cunningham or the next Paul Taylor. It's Stephen."

Petronio had no idea he would come this far. "In the early years," he...