In Beauty and the Brut, Petronio makes use of the Fischerspooner duo – exponents of the new-born electro-musical movement that renders the retro-taste of Kraftwerk’s electro-pop aggressive – and of the fashion designer, Benjamin Cho, famous for his neo-surrealist excesses.

The second part of the triptych, Bloom, defined by Petronio “a dance of transformation and re-awakening”, makes use of the baroque pop sounds of Rufus Wainwright, reading the poems of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman accompanied by the Young People’s Chorus of New York.

This is the Story of a Girl in a World is based instead on the seductive, magical voice of Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons – drag queen of New York’s underground and today the standard bearer of a highly emotional neo-romanticism and transgender aesthetic (I Am A Bird Now, the first album of 2005, was an international success). Together with Antony, his friend and mentor Lou Reed and Nico Muhly, a composer of cultured training, often working alongside Björk and Rufus Wainwright, also helped with the soundtrack.

In “Beauty and the Brut, there is the voice of a girl recounts a sentimental encounter that occurred on the beach in English and French. With echoes in Laurie Anderson style and interrupted phrases (my name is - any), between melodic sounds attenuated as much as possible, what emerges is a delightful creation. Even the lighting effected by Ken Tabachnick magically restores the haze of sea and sky above a deserted beach. And as soon as that light touches the statuesque body of Shila Tirabassi, while she curves in space, the dance takes us immediately into her seductive world.

At the outset, Petronio uses only one pair of dancers: Shila Tirabassi, fluid and dominant, and Jonathan Jaffe, deliberately amorphous and inelegant. Then other dancers, dressed in fabulous beachwear created by Benjamin Cho (half cave-man, half Erté), appear in multiple and never literal incarnations of this endless human drama.

One of the most beautiful things in the performance is the skilful manner in which Petronio makes the dancers move in his choreography and how he provides a rhythm for the pieces forming them. Just as happens in Bloom, with its whirlwind movements and the obsessive music of Rufus Wainwright, splendidly sung by the Young People's Chorus of New York.

The same thing goes for This Is the Story of a Girl in a World, a new choreography that invites us to not too demanding meditations on the difference between the sexes, in which both men and women hold the same role – sometimes aggressive and imposing, at other times persuasive and lyrical – leading us to reflect upon the relative consequences.” (Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, 3/4/08)