Janine Antoni: Collaborating with Stephen Petronio | "Exclusive" | Art21

[Janine Antoni: Collaborating with Stephen
Petronio]

[Stephen Petronio Company]

[PETRONIO] I worked very hard to develop

a very succinct and idiosyncratic

and highly-nuanced language--

and I'm in my mid-fifties--

[Stephen Petronio, Choreographer]

and it took a long time to establish that.

Now that I have,

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

The stereotype of dance is that

if we exist in this ethereal plane,

our work does disappear as we do it,

and that's the best part of it:

the moment is precious because it goes away.

You just get a glimpse of a movement,

and you have to chase it

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

["Lick and Lather", Janine Antoni]

a sculpture, you can look at from all sides

for as long as you want

to stay in the room with it.

So, I got very jealous with that.

I'm absolutely obsessed and in love

with the visual world.

I knew of Janine's work

before I knew Janine.

I've worked with people like

Cindy Sherman

and Anish Kapoor--

["Loving Care", Janine Antoni]

visual artists who I would share the space
with,

but they had their territory

and I had mine.

Well, with Janine I felt that,

because she was a performer as well,

that she would invade me in a way,

and I very much wanted to be invaded.

[ANTONI] I was asked by the choreographer,

Stephen Petronio,

to do the visuals for

a piece he was working on called

"Like Lazarus Did".

He was interested in notions

of transcendence and elevation.

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

I spent a lot of time watching him

choreograph the piece,

and spent time with the dancers.

One thing that is very evident in his work

is that it has this kind of

exuberance and complexity.

So when I looked at the work,

I said, what I would like to do is

to offer him stillness.

And rather than make a set for the dance,

I would perform as well.

For two hours during the performance

I lay completely still.

[PETRONIO] She was meditating, really,

on her body,

as the audience was looking

at our body.

She was absolutely still

in a meditation

on her form

and her own death

against the chaotic look of the stage.

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

and she kept sending him sonograms.

And he looked at these images

and used them as

positions to choreograph one of his dancers,

Nick Sciscione,

for the last dance of

"Like Lazarus Did".

When he was making that dance,

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

"because honey looks like amniotic fluid."

And then, of course,

it was impossible to do on a stage.

We were very interested in making a video

where one could not feel gravity.

["Honey Baby"]

Having had a child,

it's miraculous that a body

can grow another body--

that one body grows

from the nutrients of another body.

[PETRONIO] So there is kind of

a womb-like viscus body

moving through viscus liquid

at a very slow

and infinitesimal level.

Just the smallest movement of the finger--

and the spread of the toes

and the arch of the head--

took me, you know...

a place that I would never go on stage.

There was a kind of intimacy

that I long for on stage,

but I couldn't have on stage,

so "Honey Baby" led me to that,

and the camera led me to that.

Janine didn't invite me

to make a dance for her sculpture;

she invited me to collaborate with her

as a visual artist.

Janine and I were both

pushing Nick around verbally

in that process.

So she was getting in my face

movement-wise,

and I was getting in her face

sculpture-wise.

People find it very hard to understand that

we did this together,

because they want to think of me

as the choreographer

and her as the sculptor.

But we really tried to erase that line.

We continue to try to erase that line,

and we're working together on future projects

to do that.