At Eden Court last night to see the Stephen Petronio Dance Company from New York.  Beautiful, uplifting work performed with stunning elan and precision by the eight dancers.  Afterwards, Petronio himself took the stage for a Q and A, ably chaired by Eden Court's Dance Artist, Louise Marshall.

Petronio was urbane, witty and very direct and frank about his work and his influences. What was startling was his revelation about the state of funding for the company.  Despite being world-renowned, and having made danceworks for some of the greatest contemporary companies, Petronio can only afford to pay his dancers to work for an average of 16 hours a week, and all his dancers have to do other jobs to pay the rent (and ruin their backs and legs in the process, as Petronio wryly commented).  He was very envious of the Scottish Ballet set up, where he has just made a new piece, and where the dancers work up to forty hours a week, and so a new ballet can be put together in just five weeks.

We think the funding situation for the arts in the UK is pretty dire--and it is--but, even before the present financial crisis, the richest country in the world can, it seems, barely support the work of one of its finest dance artists.

The question I didn't get around to asking was about audiences.  For the first of two nights at Eden Court, there was an enthusiastic audience of several hundred, across a very wide age range.  Pretty good for a company's first appearance at the theatre, with work that is quite demanding in its intensity and abstraction. Even better when you consider that, by US standards, Inverness would count as a small town.  I wanted to ask how wide or narrow the audience is for contemporary dance in the States.

And the gold shoes?  The very first questioner asked Petronio where he got his dazzzling footwear.  In Paris, was the not surprising reply, but he wasn't going to tell us exactly where. Artists have to have some secrets, after all....