Return of the PUNK Ballerina - Karole Armitage

Dance Magazine, Jan, 2001 by Christopher Reardon

Karle Armitage no longer doles out earplugs or dons stiletto heels, But her dances still keep people on the edge of their seats

Twenty years ago next month, as audience members stuffed their ears with complimentary cotton balls to muffle the throb and wail of five punk rockers, Karole Armitage sliced across the floor of Manhattan's Dance Theater Workshop. Five other dancers crashed around nearby, but it was Armitage, with her volatile leaps and fractured arabesques, who caught viewers' eyes. Wrapping an arm around the guitarist Rhys Chatham, she sent one of her spidery legs to the heavens. Moments later she slammed into his guitar, releasing a howl of feedback.

The dance indelibly branded her a "punk ballerina" while its title, Drastic Classicism, became a metaphor for her way of joining seemingly contradictory elements. It wasn't long before Armitage, the unlikely protogee of both George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, began to land commissions from such disparate icons as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Madonna. Then she dropped out of sight.

After a decade spent mostly in Europe, Armitage will return to New York in late January for a short retrospective season at the Joyce Theater. The engagement is part of the theater's Altogether Different Festival, an annual showcase for artists whose work falls outside the mainstream.

Now 46, Armitage is drawn less to jarring collisions than to layered movement styles, quicksilver transitions and emotional complexities. One balmy afternoon last fall, she sat down in her lower Manhattan loft and explained her aversion to aesthetic orthodoxy, the idea that dancers should bow to certain fixed ideals.

"There is no such thing as pure," she said. "The tradition of ballet, and all forms of dance, has been to incorporate what's going on around it. The Russians clearly took folk dances and stylized them so they became part of the ballet vocabulary. And Balanchine put jazz movements into ballet."

Running her fingers through her spiky blond hair, she added: "We've got to have something that people recognize in their daily lives. Everything about life is more about cross-cultural influences, hybrid influences. That is to a great extent the history of art. The Renaissance, after all, was taking Greek ideas and updating them. That's really how art works."

That outlook helps account for her new position in Nancy, France, where she signed on last fall as resident choreographer at the newly chartered Ballet de Lorraine. The thirty-five-member company, formerly known as Ballet de Nancy, has been shifting its repertoire from classical ballet (Swan Lake, Giselle) to contemporary dance (Mathilde Monnier, Nacho Duato and soon John Neumeier).

For her retrospective in New York, Armitage rounded up eight of her favorite dancers from Italy, France, Russia and England. She also enlisted Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans, two principal dancers at New York City Ballet. They will perform Life Story (1999), a duet based on a Tennessee Williams poem and set to music by the young British composer and pianist Thomas Ades. The costumes are by the New York painter David Salle, whose artistic and personal partnership with Armitage has spanned much of the last fifteen years.

"It's a very wry and amusing depiction of a one-night stand," Armitage says. "These two people wake up in the morning and realize that they know nothing about each other and that they very likely have nothing in common. It's hilarious and at the same time kind of gut-wrenching."

The program opens on a more soulful note, with a seventeen-minute excerpt from I Had a Dream (1993), an homage Armitage created on the tenth anniversary of Balanchine's death. Commissioned by Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, it builds on familiar phrases of movement from Mr. B's Concerto Barocco, Symphony in C and Bugaku. Armitage sees it as a meditation on stability that balances "a spiritual ideal of fulfillment with a sense of longing."

Two newer pieces deliver the explosive energy that audiences have come to expect from Armitage. She describes Tango Mortale (2000) as "a wild duet, precarious and off-kilter." A brief excerpt from Schrodinger's Cat (2000), the first dance she created with the Ballet de Lorraine, reflects the dynamism of the musical score, a mix of acoustic and electronic sounds by the experimental French group Art Zoyd. "It's a raw burst of graffiti energy that takes on quite an emotional feeling," she says. "It gets to you."

Armitage grew up in the more subdued environs of Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was a research biologist. She began her dance training at age 5 with Tomi Wortham, a former member of the New York City Ballet. After further study at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the School of American Ballet and the London Dance Center, she began her professional career in 1972 with the Grand Theatre de Geneve in Switzerland, co-directed by Balanchine and Patricia Neary.

She left for New York in 1975 and joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where her daring and grace colored such abstract works as Squaregame and Channels/Inserts. It was then that she began moonlighting as a choreographer and unleashed the series of punk ballets that peaked with Drastic Classicism.