A Path Beyond Death: Stephen Petronio's 'Like Lazarus Did': The New Yorker Before a recent performance of Stephen Petronio's newest work, "Like Lazarus Did," at the Joyce, a living art installation occupied the theatre. In the nearly thirty years that Petronio has had his company, visual elements and collaborations have always been important, and this work would be no different. Hanging high above the right side of the audience was the artist Janine Antoni, supine, in a red metal helicopter stretcher, her feet pointed toward the stage. Suspended above her, from beaded chains, were replicas of parts of her body - lungs, arm bones, spine, leg, torso. In her left hand, she held a caged light bulb. At the lip of the stage was Petronio, on his back, in a black suit and a white shirt, shoeless, his hands folded over his abdomen. Petronio is in his mid-fifties now, but he hasn't seemed to age. The bottom of the theatre's red curtain hovered a few feet above him. A low, subtly mutating tone filled the space, a complement to Antoni's and Petronio's meditative states. Three musicians entered the theatre - a guitarist (Son Lux, who composed the music for "Like Lazarus Did"), a violinist (Rob Moose), and a trumpeter (C. J. Camerieri) - along with a few dozen members of the Young People's Chorus of New York, who would be participating in the evening's live music. The musicians kept to a corner by the stage, and the kids, dressed in long, black apron-like garments, filled the two aisles. There was also a man carrying a large black umbrella, as in a New Orleans funeral; Son Lux had shown Petronio a book of American slave songs, and these provided the inspiration for the dance. Plaintively, in his clear, high voice, the composer sang, "I want to die ...," and the chorus completed his phrase: ..." like Lazarus did." They repeated this, creating a hypnotic cadence, a mantra, made all the more powerful by the presence of Antoni, who would remain above us for the duration of the hour-long piece. This much stillness was a canny introduction, since Petronio's choreography can tend to be pyrotechnic, almost overabundantly so. When Son Lux sang, "Come out!," over and over, we could see, in the narrow strip created by the raised curtain, the dancers" legs as they took the stage; the chorus members left the aisles and went to sit in the balcony. The stage lights came up on three trios of dancers, the six men in knee-length sheer white long-sleeved dresses and the three women in shorter white dresses, with piecemeal sleeves. As Son Lux, now at the piano, struck a key repeatedly, and sang, "Alleluia," leading us into the work, each trio began to move - easy arms and torsos, gentle and weighted - and pleasing bits of unison arose, linking dancers in different groups. Eventually, a babble of voices could be heard, and the trios" phrases started accumulating, weaving a texture as we watched. Sweeping arms, etched beautifully against the black background, led into little leaps coming downstage; the music and the choreography picked up in complexity, until the trios resolved in a still moment, with two figures of each trio on the ground and one standing above them, an image of threat but also of stewardship. This duality became even stronger when Petronio entered, still wearing his suit, and helped lay down three of the dancers. It was the last we would see of Petronio, a Lazarus figure himself early on but here a kind of undertaker - and also the dance's caretaker. The three dancers proceeded to writhe up from the floor, and this regeneration was evident in Son Lux's music, too, which alluded to death as a release. "Done with this troubled world at last," he sang, as Joshua Green, lit strongly from above, danced a solo of angular fluidity, ending in relevé, gazing upward, in the direction of hoped-for salvation. All of the ten dancers in Petronio's company have the fearless attack and whip-quick control that has come to mark his choreography, and "Like Lazarus Did" had plenty of it. But there were exquisite passages that revealed a quieter, more nuanced and emotional side of his work. Julian De Leon, in a sheer black shift, danced a contained solo in which he thoughtfully described circular patterns around the stage, until he was joined by Natalie Mackessy, small and blond, and Emily Stone, tall and dark, in tattered brown gauzy costumes. To a song whose lyrics were based on a Sojourner Truth speech ("When I cried out my mother's cry / No one but Jesus heard me, no one but Jesus heard"), the women moved separately but were not oblivious of each other; their movements were abstract but related, with a sexuality, a snakiness, that is expected of Petronio, but here subdued. The women ended up on the floor, Stone cradling Mackessy tenderly. Often, such moments existed in the middle of more boisterous movement. Green lifted Mackessy's limp body at one point, and then the two of them launched into full Petronio mode, with legs arcing through the air. Joshua Tuason and Nicholas Sciscione followed this with a duet of halting struggle, subjugation, and weakness, while, opposite them, De Leon and Stone danced vibrantly, energy coursing through every channel, every gesture a fully realized detail. Petronio had created a constantly shifting landscape, in which groupings came and went in pristine but short-lived episodes, phrases building in complexity, winding and unwinding, and his collaborators kept up with this varied exploration. Throughout the piece, the smooth, black abyss of the background would periodically dissolve to show the theatre's brick wall, which Ken Tabachnick lit with reddish hues, as if shuttling us from the spiritual realm to the temporal; frequently, strong shafts of light cut through fog, adding cinematic drama to the abstract work. H. Petal's changing costumes alternated between simple and complicated, as the dance itself did. Son Lux's songs were a linchpin, but the instrumental sections provided subtler context for the choreography. A pulsing drumbeat accompanied a solo by the Petronio veteran Gino Grenek (who appeared to be dancing as well as he ever has); a pulsing dissonance shadowed Green, Tuason, Sciscione, and Davalois Fearon as they moved about the stage in a tight-knit group, Fearon catapulting herself off her companions" bodies, then being lifted high above them. And the chorus was always there, adding a sweet, rich tone to the songs; the innocence of their voices seemed a crucial element in the terrain that Petronio had mapped out. Petronio, who has described himself as a "fallen Catholic," knows well the Christian stories and rituals, and his sense of spectacle dovetails nicely with that of the Church. But the theatricality of "Like Lazarus Did" had a simplicity that reflected the slave songs. Petronio led us steadily on a path beyond death, ending the work with a solo for Sciscione. Blond-haired, clad only in beige trunks, he cut a monochromatic figure, but he was far from monotone. He moved a little drunkenly at first, making loose punching gestures. Then, in a pool of light, he danced a remarkable floor-bound solo, his body folding over on itself, his bottom hiking up, his limbs curling in, protectively. In his contortions, he came to seem human yet other, or like a man struggling to find a way out of a suffocating dream. Accompanying this difficult waking, this rebirth, Lux sang a lullaby: "River's wide and water's deep / Boat rocks slow, sway you to sleep." Eventually, Sciscione stood and turned away from us, rising onto the balls of his feet. As his arms lifted at his sides, the lights faded. Our attention went again to Antoni, the body parts hanging above her creating a fragmented, still afterimage of the movement we had just seen onstage. Before entering the theatre, we had been given small cards; on one side was a photograph of Antoni's hand, holding her light; on the other was the question "Should I look among the living / Should I look among the dead / If I'm searching for you?" Antoni had been with us all along, our guide. Above: Nicholas Sciscione. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes.