Return of the PUNK Ballerina - Karole Armitage

Dance Magazine, Jan, 2001 by Christopher Reardon

After leaving Cunningham in spring 1981, she formed her own troupe, first known as Armitage Gone! Dance and later (as she tilted from drastic to classicism) as the Armitage Ballet. But running a company made her feel like a full-time fund-raiser, so she disbanded the troupe in 1989 and took on freelance assignments with the Pads Opera Ballet and other major companies. During a stint in Los Angeles, she worked on videos for Madonna ("Vogue") and Michael Jackson ("In the Closet") and directed a short film (Hall of Mirrors).

Then, in 1995, she assumed direction of MaggioDanza di Firenze, an Italian ballet company with forty-five dancers. Her work there included choreographing a new version of Pinocchio, with costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and creating a new ballet about the rise and fall of Michael Milken, Wall Street's former junk-bond king. It was called The Predator's Ball, and when she brought it to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1996, her ballet dancers swirled in counterpoint to a crew of rappers and vogue artists recruited from New York nightclubs.

Armitage returned to New York in 1999 to create a work for Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. Called The Last Lap and set to a deceptively simple piano quartet by Shostakovich, it cast five women and one man (Baryshnikov) in a whirling, bittersweet fugue about two lovers trying to connect in a cruel world. "I was interested in contradictory forces," she says. "Will and destiny, vulnerability and strength, lyricism and turbulence."

Lately, Armitage has been reveling in the excesses of baroque opera. In Florence, she choreographed a new production of Handel's Apollo e Dafne. In Nancy, she is starting work on a new staging of Rameau's Pygmalion. Both pieces are on the New York City Opera's calendar for 2002.

What's more, they both feature sets and costumes by James Ivory, the director of such period dramas as A Room with a View and Howard's End. Their collaboration grew out of a series of chance encounters while attending two very different types of events: baroque opera and avant-garde theater and dance.

"We realized we had these seemingly opposed mutual loves," Armitage says. "It's definitely the most wild thing he ever did, and the most conservative I ever did. So the fusion has worked well for both of us."

Armitage's proclivity for contradictory impulses will be on full display at the Joyce Theater this month, particularly in Nadaswaram (1998), which is set to percussive classical music from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Armitage took waving and popping in the South Bronx style, combined it with her wild brand of ballet, and added hand positions from bharata natyam, one of India's seven classical dance forms. She even mixed in some capoeira, a martial art from Brazil.

"It becomes a whirlwind of energy in which the different flavors express an erotic vibrancy and a spiritual ambience," she says. "What I like best about it is the contrast of very lyrical, sensuous waving mixed with this intense, percussive movement style."