On an idyllic spring day, the choreographer Stephen Petronio was standing in his favorite spot at the Petronio Residency Center, an elevated wooden structure that he calls the perch. With sweeping views of the Catskills and beyond, the quiet space sits on the lush, hilltop property he has transformed, over the past six years, into a retreat for choreographers and dancers, where artists can come to work — or not work — outside the usual demands of daily life.
“Whether you need money or you need an idea, it’s all better when you come here,” he said of the perch.
If he sounded a little wistful, that’s because he was preparing to say goodbye. Caught in a web of financial difficulties, Petronio and his board of advisers have decided to close the center and put the 175-acre property up for sale. The final residency takes place this month.
“It’s a very, very heartbreaking decision,” he said, “but I don’t see any other way forward.”
Jill Brienza, the board chair of the Stephen Petronio Company, which owns the center, echoed that sentiment in a phone interview: “We talked with a lot of people. Thought about every option. We didn’t do this lightly.”
When the center opened, in 2018, dance in the Hudson River Valley seemed to be booming. But now Petronio’s enterprise joins other dance-focused institutions that have closed in recent years, or gone on seemingly indefinite hiatus, like Lumberyard, in Catskill, N.Y., and Mount Tremper Arts, both of which supported New York City choreographers in building new work.
Petronio, 67, acknowledged that, in certain respects, he had been unwilling to make financial compromises. Having encountered all kinds of working conditions throughout his career, he said he wanted resident artists to feel “treated like the queens and kings we are.” That meant providing not only room and board, unlimited studio access and a stipend, but also locally sourced meals prepared by chefs on site. “The starving artist thing?” he said. “Not here.”
Residencies have been awarded to more than 25 artists, including Nora Chipaumire and Jamar Roberts. For artists coming from New York City, as many did, the sheer amount of space was a luxury. The grounds feature a 2,500-square-foot studio; a five-bedroom, eight-bathroom, two-kitchen house; an organic garden; and 77 acres conserved through a $500,000 grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
As the founder and artistic director of the Stephen Petronio Company, a contemporary dance troupe based in New York City that has endured for nearly 40 years, Petronio is no stranger to economic uncertainty. Known for his collaborations with high-profile visual artists, the company purchased the center with proceeds from the sale of a sculpture by Anish Kapoor and from auctioning other works of art.
“My career has always been like, you’re in a river, and you’re jumping from stone to stone, and you get to the next place,” Petronio said. With the residency center, “I just assumed that was going to happen, because it always has.”
“And then the pandemic happened,” he added. “If all things had continued the way they were going before the pandemic, we would be OK.”
Petronio said the center’s financial challenges included “the wobbling of the stock market,” as well as a shift in the priorities of foundations toward funding social justice-oriented initiatives, which, he said, “I stand 100 percent behind.” Grants that he was counting on didn’t come through, he said, noting that the center is now operating through a $500,000 government loan.
During the depths of the pandemic, his company lost all touring engagements, a critical source of earned income, he said. To provide opportunities for dance artists in a bleak time, he kept the center open, with added safety precautions and a new application-based program devised by Marya Warshaw, who became the center’s director in March 2020. (Previously, residencies had been awarded only through a nomination and selection process.) When not in use by artists, the house was rented out through Airbnb though rental income dropped when pandemic restrictions eased, Petronio said.
The property will be listed at $4.2 million, more than three times the $1.3 million it was bought for in 2016. Petronio said he intends to use the revenue to continue supporting younger artists, and he hopes to expand a local dance education program that evolved in tandem with the center. Brienza said money from the sale would also support Petronio’s continued creation of new work for his company.
Part of Petronio’s vision, he said, was to release artists from expectations of creating a finished product — or any product. “My proposal is: What happens if you take away all those pressures to your creative self?”
The choreographer Rashaun Mitchell, who had a residency in 2022 with his partner Silas Riener and other collaborators, said that between rehearsals, the group took “ample breaks to go rejuvenate ourselves and come back and work.”
“Being able to get out of the city, commune with nature, take a big breath of fresh air — it did wonders for all of us in the process,” Mitchell said.
Warshaw, who is also the former director of Brooklyn Arts Exchange, said she sees the Petronio Residency Center’s closure as a reflection of larger changes in “the ecosystem that is New York City dance and performance.”
“Things are quite precarious right now,” she said. “When one institution closes and there are others that are struggling or closing, that’s profound for our field, which didn’t even have nearly enough to begin with.”
Petronio, who lives next door to the center, seems to maintain a spirit of optimism. Residing in nature, he said, “has had a giant impact on my thinking.” He describes it like this: “When there’s no possibility left, a new one cracks open.”
