Chaos Control

Critics are fond of describing Stephen Petronio's dances as aggressive and sex-driven. Enjoying an austere breakfast of dry bagel and poached egg white a few days ago, an affable and unpretentious Petronio tried to figure out why: "I swivel my hips, I have a bald head, I've taken my shirt off, I've worn corsets, I've had flowers on my tights, but I've never made pieces about sex. Part of the problem with defining me is that I'm a formalist but not a classicist, and my morality is not classical."

Petronio's dances move through sensual and well-honed patterns that swiftly disperse encoded messages. Diamanda Galas, the Beastie Boys, and, most often, David Linton, whose scores resemble a funked-up John Cage, blast away while visual images or text is projected around the dancers. His work over the past 15 years has been furiously active and bullet-quick; the current offering is less of both. "At first I got good at making movement, then moving environments, and then architectural developments," he explained. "Now audiences will see a series of structures that create a landscape -- a trail through a land. I like to overload the senses. But here I'm colluding with the audience. It's slower and simpler."

Petronio's company is in the midst of a long-term association with Center for the Arts, which consists of monthlong residencies once a year through 2001. The 1998 edition culminates in the evening-length Not Garden. It was inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which notorious contemporaries fill hell's graduated circles of sin. Not Garden takes place in our own hellish century, Petronio told me, where chaos reigns, with overweaned egotism as its helpmate. Divided into three sections, the work begins with the choreographer dancing alone to Ave Maria. Petronio regularly awes audiences with the sheer volume of virtuosity he packs into a few minutes and his small frame. But this solo opens the show with something softer -- "a prayer to a less reactive, more indirect and surging energy" -- before it descends into chaotic action.

For Petronio, chaos is this century's dominant force; the artist's job is to sculpt it. But even though he works with chaos, Petronio also distances himself from it by embracing one of its mortal enemies -- mysticism. He considers latter-day cabala perfectly in sync with his vocation. A cabalist scans Hebrew letters, which he may not know how to read, in order to open himself to God's word. Petronio works in a similar vein: "I spend the day working with spirits. I make things out of nothing. That's the currency I deal with, so how could I believe that it's just my body making a shape?" Many choreographers, equally committed to evoking contemporary life, might wonder how you could believe anything else. For them, the body carries its own meaning. But Stephen Petronio has always been an iconoclast, even if it involves returning to a very old notion. "I believe," he confessed, "nothing happens by accident." The Stephen Petronio Company performs at 8 p.m. Thursday (the show runs through April 26) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard (at Third Street), S.F. Admission is $6-25; call 392-4400.

-- Apollinaire Scherr