Excerpt from Curtain Chat with Wendy Perron: on Halprin
After one of the Company’s performances of the third season of Bloodlines at The Joyce Theater in March, 2017, Stephen sat down with Wendy Perron to discuss the works on the program. Wendy noted that there were two chreographer-created-solos on the program, one by Anna Halprin and performed by Stephen, and one by Steve Paxton and performed by Nicholas Sciscione. Stephen recognized that recreating these works presented a unique challenge, but characterized his intentions like this: “What I want to do is get the consciousness of their bodies back into our bodies and to give you portraits of these great artists.” They went on to dissect his performance on Halprin’s The Courtesan and the Crone, which Wendy observed had changed in tone a bit from the last time she had seen it performed by Stephen. Stephen explained that the piece itself is “about female sexuality and aging” and that, at first, he wasn’t sure about her choice for him to remount it. But as he rehearsed it and began performing it, he found ways to complicate its meaning for himself by being in a sort of dual state towards the end of the work, “deliberating between being horrified and finding some kind of power in my decrepitude.”