NON LOCOMOTOR will be a full-company work set to a commissioned score combining electronic music and choral accompaniment by Michael Volpe (aka Clams Casino), a 27-year-old self-taught hiphop producer whose ambient and emotionally-resonant electronic tracks have broadened the boundaries of that genre.  A 40-minute dance, NON LOCOMOTOR will premiere as a companion piece to the 25-minute dance LOCOMOTOR, being produced for Stephen Petronio Company’s (SPC) 2014 season. The two works will be combined on an evening-length program for SPC’s spring 2015 NYC season at The Joyce, which will be the culminating event in the company’s year-long 30^th Anniversary celebration. The evening will be called LOCOMOTOR/NON LOCOMOTOR.

LOCOMOTOR/NON LOCOMOTOR is about the power of movement – specifically, the relationship between high-speed motion traveling out into space and stationary movement surging throughout the body. Petronio theorizes that traveling forward through space stimulates future, creative imagination and traveling backwards stimulates nostalgic rumination.  LOCOMOTOR explores these directional pulls within the body and the human/intuitive, personal identity issues that arise from this investigation.  NON LOCOMOTOR, on the other hand, will start from the spine and its ability to initiate torque and torsion.  In both works, Petronio will take his dancers and audiences on an intensely kinetic journey in pursuit of a heightened experience of the present.

This project unites Petronio’s choreography with the cutting-edge music of composer Volpe, who has burst onto the experimental music scene through the world of hiphop. Petronio has said of Volpe, “he crafts densely layered aural fields that take the listener on a journey, moving from the physical and sensual to something profoundly spiritual. This is also exactly what I aim at in my choreography.” This will be Volpe’s second collaboration with Stephen Petronio Company and will build on his experience creating the score for LOCOMOTOR in 2014.  In Petronio’s view, Volpe’s genre-bending compositions display a keen sense of harmony, a pop sensibility, and an aural complexity in which sounds rise, then dissolve into a dream-like haze.  In addition,  Volpe and Petronio are cousins; Volpe has watched Stephen’s work for most of his life.

Vocal music sung by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City (YPC), under the direction of Francisco Núñez will be sampled as part of Volpe’s score. Long-standing collaborators on the work including lighting designer Ken Tabachnick, and the Company’s dancers, who have been with SPC for periods ranging from 3-15 years. The development of the project will be featured on SPC’s new online audience engagement platform, with behind-the-scenes video and blog posts revealing aspects of the creative process to our audience.

The project will help SPC mark this milestone year with a significant full evening of new work about movement and memory, created in collaboration with an emerging innovator in electronic music.