Longtime Stephen Petronio Company dancer Gino Grenek will dance the male solo in MIDDLESEXGORGE at the Joyce this week (photo by Sarah Silver)
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
March 8-13, $10-$60
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org
petron.io
Last April, Newark-born dancer and choreographer Stephen Petronio premiered his new initiative, “Bloodlines,” at the Joyce, presenting Merce Cunningham’s RainForest. The five-year project will consist of iconic works from master American choreographers, paired with a new work by Petronio. This week the New York-based company returns to the Joyce with the second edition of “Bloodlines,” performing Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, her 1979 silent piece featuring costumes and visual design by Robert Rauschenberg, who also designed the lighting with Beverly Emmons. Glacial Decoy was Brown’s first piece for a proscenium stage and debuted the same year that Petronio joined her company as its first male dancer. To complement the all-female Glacial Decoy, Petronio has chosen to reconstruct his 1990 piece about gender and power, MiddleSexGorge, set to commissioned music by the British band Wire and inspired by Petronio’s participation with the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in the late 1980s. Company dancer and assistant artistic director Gino Grenek, in his seventeenth and last season with the troupe, will take the male solo and one half of the male duet. “The piece is ferocious and the dancers must be fearless in their execution of the dance. Hands grab, legs fly, heads whip, and torsos twist at warp speed. It is a rite of passage for every Petronio dancer to perform MiddleSexGorge,” Grenek writes on the company’s blog. “I adore it, I crave it, and I am humbled by it.” Also on the bill is the world premiere of Petronio’s Big Daddy Deluxe, an updated version of his 2014 solo “talking dance” Big Daddy, a tribute to his late father, built around text from Petronio’s 2014 memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict; the work has now been expanded for the full company, which includes Grenek, Davalois Fearon, Kyle Filley, Cori Kresge, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, Nicholas Sciscione, Emily Stone, and Joshua Tuason. The March 10 performance will be followed by a Curtain Chat with members of the company
You might think that the phrase “the French Touch,” which is part of the title of FIAF’s March-April edition of its CinéSalon series, refers to the unique style of such French auteurs as François Truffaut, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Jean Cocteau, Éric Rohmer, and others whose films are often included in these Tuesday-night festivals. But the term actually describes a group of DJs and bands associated with electronic dance music, or EDM, in France. So it is rather appropriate for the series, “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film,” to kick off with Daft Punk Unchained, a thumping documentary about the patron saints of that movement, the iconoclastic duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk. Director Hervé Martin Delpierre, who cowrote the film with Marina Rozenman, had his work cut out for him, as he had to make the film without the participation of Daft Punk itself, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, who have not shown their faces in public this century and rarely give interviews of any kind. But Delpierre gets just about everyone else who has ever worked with them to open up, allowing others to interpret the band’s musical evolution and cultural impact as he traces DP’s career from 1992, when they were in the somewhat more traditional bass-guitar-drum combo Darlin’, to the worldwide sensation of their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, as they melded American disco, German techno, and Manchester industrial into something wholly new. A special focus is placed on their mind-blowing show at Coachella in 2006, which single-handedly changed the future of EDM.