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[Janine Antoni: Collaborating with Stephen
Petronio]

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[Stephen Petronio Company]

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[PETRONIO] I worked very hard to develop

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a very succinct and idiosyncratic

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and highly-nuanced language--

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and I'm in my mid-fifties--

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[Stephen Petronio, Choreographer]

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and it took a long time to establish that.

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Now that I have,

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I'm kind of like, "Now what?"

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The stereotype of dance is that

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if we exist in this ethereal plane,

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our work does disappear as we do it,

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and that's the best part of it:

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the moment is precious because it goes away.

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You just get a glimpse of a movement,

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and you have to chase it

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or try to hold it in your memory, but...

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["Lick and Lather", Janine Antoni]

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a sculpture, you can look at from all sides

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for as long as you want

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to stay in the room with it.

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So, I got very jealous with that.

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I'm absolutely obsessed and in love

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with the visual world.

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I knew of Janine's work

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before I knew Janine.

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I've worked with people like

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Cindy Sherman

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and Anish Kapoor--

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["Loving Care", Janine Antoni]

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visual artists who I would share the space
with,

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but they had their territory

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and I had mine.

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Well, with Janine I felt that,

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because she was a performer as well,

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that she would invade me in a way,

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and I very much wanted to be invaded.

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[ANTONI] I was asked by the choreographer,

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Stephen Petronio,

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to do the visuals for

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a piece he was working on called

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"Like Lazarus Did".

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He was interested in notions

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of transcendence and elevation.

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["Like Lazarus Did", The Joyce Theater, NYC]

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I spent a lot of time watching him

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choreograph the piece,

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and spent time with the dancers.

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One thing that is very evident in his work

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is that it has this kind of

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exuberance and complexity.

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So when I looked at the work,

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I said, what I would like to do is

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to offer him stillness.

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And rather than make a set for the dance,

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I would perform as well.

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For two hours during the performance

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I lay completely still.

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[PETRONIO] She was meditating, really,

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on her body,

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as the audience was looking

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at our body.

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She was absolutely still

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in a meditation

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on her form

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and her own death

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against the chaotic look of the stage.

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[ANTONI] Stephen's cousin was having a baby,

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and she kept sending him sonograms.

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And he looked at these images

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and used them as

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positions to choreograph one of his dancers,

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Nick Sciscione,

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for the last dance of

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"Like Lazarus Did".

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When he was making that dance,

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I said, "Stephen, we should do it in honey,"

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"because honey looks like amniotic fluid."

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And then, of course,

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it was impossible to do on a stage.

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We were very interested in making a video

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where one could not feel gravity.

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["Honey Baby"]

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Having had a child,

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it's miraculous that a body

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can grow another body--

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that one body grows

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from the nutrients of another body.

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[PETRONIO] So there is kind of

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a womb-like viscus body

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moving through viscus liquid

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at a very slow

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and infinitesimal level.

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Just the smallest movement of the finger--

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and the spread of the toes

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and the arch of the head--

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took me, you know...

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a place that I would never go on stage.

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There was a kind of intimacy

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that I long for on stage,

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but I couldn't have on stage,

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so "Honey Baby" led me to that,

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and the camera led me to that.

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Janine didn't invite me

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to make a dance for her sculpture;

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she invited me to collaborate with her

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as a visual artist.

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Janine and I were both

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pushing Nick around verbally

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in that process.

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So she was getting in my face

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movement-wise,

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and I was getting in her face

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sculpture-wise.

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People find it very hard to understand that

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we did this together,

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because they want to think of me

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as the choreographer

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and her as the sculptor.

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But we really tried to erase that line.

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We continue to try to erase that line,

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and we're working together on future projects

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to do that.