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A little more than 40 years after its founding, the Stephen Petronio Company<\/a> is disbanding, it announced on Wednesday. The dance troupe will have its final performances at the Jacob\u2019s Pillow Dance Festival in July.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a wild, beautiful ride,\u201d Petronio, 68, said in a phone interview. \u201cThis is the Year of Snake, and it\u2019s time to shed what doesn\u2019t work anymore and move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n What doesn\u2019t work anymore, Petronio said, is what he has been doing for decades: sustaining a company of dancers through touring and grants. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t enough work for the dancers,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people that had presented us were beginning to disappear, and the funding for those presenters was beginning to shift.\u201d<\/p>\n The breakdown of what is sometimes called \u201cthe company model\u201d has been happening for many years, but it was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and, in response to the murder of George Floyd, a displacement of dance funding into social justice projects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cA lot of company leaders decided this well before I did,\u201d Petronio said. \u201cI was determined to ride it as long as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n When Petronio founded the company in 1984, he did so in a very different cultural environment. The first male member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, he was following a tradition of branching off on his own, extending a lineage. He developed his own movement style: complex and erotic, well-crafted yet unpredictable. (In his 2014 memoir, \u201cConfessions of a Motion Addict,\u201d he called himself \u201ca formalist with a dirty mind.\u201d) And he became known for collaborations with celebrities from the worlds of art, music and fashion, like Cindy Sherman, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Tara Subkoff\/Imitation of Christ.<\/p>\n In a 2010 New York Times review<\/a> of one of his company\u2019s 25 seasons at the Joyce Theater, Roslyn Sulcas called Petronio \u201cone of the few contemporary choreographers to have created an instantly recognizable style and also a substantial oeuvre.\u201d<\/p>\n