#Repost @stephenpetronio ・・・ NYTimes Dance Critic @alastair.macaulay said beautiful words about the company ・・・ Nicholas Sciscione and Melissa Toogood in Merce Cunningham’s “RainForest” as danced in 2016 by the Stephen Petronio Dance Company in its Bloodlines project, tracing the choreographic forerunners to whom Petronio is indebted. “RainForest” (1968) is famous for its decor of Andy Warhol helium-filled silver pillows and its strange, changing, feral intensity; I saw it many times with the Cunningham company between 1988 and 2011. On Tuesday evening, the Dance on Camera Festival gave the premiere of “If the Dancer Dances”, a new 100-minute film by Maia Wechsler and Lise Friedman about the process whereby Cunningham alumni taught “RainForest” to Petronio’s company. By focusing on the difficulties and challenges of this gestation period - interlaced with views of New York itself, a city in continual change - this film makes both Cunningham’s and Petronio’s styles remarkably vivid. The leading Petronio dancer Gino Grenek, learning Cunningham’s own role without ever feeling at home in it, emerges with an exceptional nobility (he has such quiet authority that you see why Petronio was right to insist on casting him) and Petronio, so warm in his welcoming of Cunningham outsiders and in his encouragement of his own dancers to embrace alien stimuli, is the other hero of the movie. Toogood, a brilliant Cunningham dancer of his final years who joined the Petronio troupe for this season, speaks of Cunningham with memorable emotion; Davalois Fearon goes through a process similar to Grenek’s, finding it hard to find herself in Cunningham. Members of the original “RainForest” cast - Albert Reid, Gus Solomons Jr. - speak vividly; Cunningham alumni involved in the staging - Meg Harper, Andrea Weber (who allows herself to be seen as almost comically over-perfectionist and anxious), Rashaun Mitchell - are vivid contributors. The title comes from a quotation that appears at the end. “If the dancer dances, everything is there”: Merce Cunningham (who died nine years ago today). By the time it appears, you have been through such an arc of experience that you read these words with

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