Petronio Troupe’s Kinetic Eloquence Closes Barclay Series

The costumes are filmy, stringy, tight and revealing. The dancers are hard-bodied and hot. The movement is crisp, kinetic, stage-devouring and full of surprise popcorn explosions.

The Stephen Petronio Company made a sensational Orange County debut Thursday to close the enterprising Feet First Contemporary Dance Series at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

The showcase piece was “Lareigne,” in which long sequences of hard-edged, post-Tharpian movement set to a punk score give way to jarring moments of stasis that turn ominous. What, for instance, are the dancers looking at stage left, as the lighting grows stark and harsh? What terrible thing do they see poised on the horizon that can stop their energy cold? Petronio only lets us guess.

The dancers were Kristen Borg, Gerald Casel, Steven Fetherhuff, Ori Flomin, Jessica Meeker, Kimberly Olson and Tony Ramos, with Flomin in the opening, off-balance solo. Manolo designed the costumes. Ken Tabachnick designed the lighting.

Petronio opened the evening with his fabulously sinuous, rooted-in-place solo “#3,” danced to music by Lenny Pickett.

Less successful were “#4” and “Drawn That Way,” both West Coast premieres. The first, to music of Diamanda Galas, added dancers to the moving-without-moving idea of “#3.” Unfortunately, additional bodies--Flomin, Olson, Petronio and Ramos--didn’t do anything to amplify the impact.

“Drawn,” to music by the group Suede and Andy Tierstein, was full of Petronio’s trademark kinetic vocabulary and skillful deployment of dancers in stage space, but it remained an abstract movement machine. Even so, Casel had a terrific opening solo (wisely, the plastic pill strapped to his back at the New York premiere last month has been removed). He also danced the piece’s tortuous, “touchless” pas de deux with Meeker.