Of Fisherspooner and Fishing Nets

I feel a fair amount of modern dance is fairly serious - high minded. Aspiring to combine music, the gorgeously abstract unknowable artform, with the highest achievements of the human body (this side of Champ Bailey)...Stephen Petronio is a horse of a different color. Sure, his dancers are stunning, one of the most solid ensembles I've seen, but when even the greatest dancers are dancing to...well, Fisherspooner, rather than say, Mozart or the blips and squeaks that accompany William Forsythe, you are inviting a rather blunt question: What was the point?

Asking what the point of a piece of art is is sort of a nasty, cheating question. Must art defend itself? And is one piece of art better than another because it has loftier intentions..? Are Schubert's songs better than Bob Dylan's or Paul Simon's because he used trickier harmonic motion and better lyrics? Ah! Trick question. The melodies of Paul Simon are as well-crafted as any of Schubert's, and Schubert frequently set truly terrible poems to music. His songs are memorable despite the setting of poems that would be forgotten otherwise.

But back to Stephen Petronio and his troupe of awesome dancers, whose show I saw at the Joyce on April 3rd. The music choices were unconventional and somewhat daring - Fisherspooner, Rufus Wainwright, various Antony Hegerty songs and collaborations. This is music that could be criticized as a little too hip, or trendy. An intelligent artist getting a hold of a hipster's ipod. But as it happens, this is music that mines a different, darker material than Mozart or bips and squeaks, no matter the fashionable reputation.

Highlights of the evening included Davalois Fearon dancing to Antony's "For Today I am a Boy," (which is one of the most emotionally exposed songs I know of). As part of This is the Story of a Girl in the World, Fearon danced with a (and I venture into the land of Platitudia here) vulnerable strength that was heart-breaking. The first piece, the world premiere Beauty and the Brut, was to music by Fisherspooner, a slowly emerging tale of a woman who discovers she is not alone on a beach. Here the dancers were at their best and the interplay of the dancers was beautiul AND eeire...proof that exactly what the source material is doesn't matter, if it inspires something worthwhile from someone else. Also the costumes, which made all the dancers look like gym ad models caught in fishing nets, rocked.

Gym Ad Model + Fishing Net = Beauty and the Brut!