DANCE REVIEW : Stephen Petronio Company in Southern California Debut

In Stephen Petronio’s “Close Your Eyes and Think of England,” a tender kiss passes down a line of four women. In his “AnAmnesia,” the almost obsessively fast, swooping group movement suddenly stops to isolate a single action: the stroking of an arm.

In “Surrender II,” two guys in abbreviated sailor suits are all over one another in playful, gymnastic partnering gambits that evolve into another statement about the awareness of touch--of how it feels to be in another man’s arms.

Clearly, Petronio is playing with fire. Ever since our Puritan forefathers denounced dancing as profane and promiscuous, Anglo-American choreographers have taken refuge in abstraction, in narrative, in technical display, in music visualization, in process and structure and spectacle--anything to camouflage the awful truth that Petronio blithely accepts.

Yes, dance audiences do spend a lot of time looking at bodies. And, yes, even the pure in heart may fleetingly wonder exactly what certain of those bodies feel like . Come on, confess. It’s only human.

In his company’s Southern California debut Friday at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, Petronio used the full conceptual and technical resources of post-minimalism to explore body sensitivity: how we reveal ourselves through stance, cooperative action and, above all, touch.

Sometimes this former Trisha Brown dancer slyly confounded our expectations--as in the opening of “AnAmnesia,” where women did the showy, athletic stuff while men sensually flexed and undulated. Elsewhere, he preferred a scorched-earth frontal attack--as in the group piece “Simulacrum Reels” with its intimidating buildup of force and velocity. Even here, however, the final statement proved disarmingly intimate and tactile: the seven-member company limping away, with each dancer dangling a foot as if it were broken.

Petronio’s solo, “3,” defined the essentials of his style. Think of it as slash-and-burn choreography: sharp, steely gestural ideas melting into one another through volcanic torso action. “3” focused on gesticulation-in-place, but the lush muscularity of the movement proved no less exciting here than in the space-devouring group works. This is dance of great intelligence and sophistication, but so fiercely hot and involving you may never even notice.

Rhythmic contemporary music helped energize all the pieces, with David Linton supplying the accompaniments for everything but “3” (set to jazz by Lenny Pickett) and “AnAmnesia” (to a commissioned score by Peter Gordon).

Justin Terzi’s scenic designs for “AnAmensia” and “Simulacrum Reels” have also been much praised. However, on the La Jolla program (part of NEOFEST, the seventh annual Festival of New Art sponsored by Sushi Gallery, San Diego) the company chose to dance on a bare stage.