Karole Armitage: it's hard enough to keep a dance company afloat, let alone keep in perfect step with the times for more than two decades. This still-radical choreographer has done both

Interview, March, 2004 by David Salle

Whether raising her arms to the heavens in arabesque or falling to the floor to slither like a serpent, movement--classical or bebop, Balanchine or breakdance--has been Karole Armitage's letter to the world. For just over a quarter century, she has been performing and choreographing an uncommonly wide synthesis of the many ways to dance she has observed, assimilating and elaborating along the way. When she began, the Kansas-born Armitage was a scrupulously trained, sophisticated product of New York City's ballet-dance axis, which then offered homes and hospitality to many of the art's greatest talents as well as maintained close ties to the most daring artists in other genres. Today, she is an internationally recognized force majeure in dance and opera, choreographing and directing from Naples to New York City. This summer she is serving as director of the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Dance, and this month her own troupe, Armitage Gone! Dance, plays New York City's dance palace, the Joyce Theater, presenting the world premiere of her latest, Time Is the Echo of the Axe Within the Wood. In this interview with painter David Salle, an important person not only in her life but in her art, Armitage updates, evaluates, and predicts.

PATRICK GILES

DAVID SALLE: Hi, Karole. How is Amsterdam?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: It's totally fabulous.

DS: Great. Well, I have a few questions for you. After a lifetime in dance and ballet, you have recently turned your hand, or I should say your toe, to opera. Tell me about your last two opera projects.

KA: The first one, which is being done here in Amsterdam, is Bela Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, and the second is Christoph Willibald von Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice in Naples. I've been incredibly lucky because both of them are masterpieces in terms of their librettos, which are brilliantly written, and their music.

DS: Tell me about them.

KA: The Bartok was a great way to start with opera because there are only two singers. It's basically about the incredible difficulty of love. The libretto was written by a poet [Bela Balazs] who became a filmmaker, and it is completely metaphorical. What I wanted to do in this is bring the body to opera instead of hiding singers' bodies with costumes.

DS: Could you get the singers to move?

KA: Yes, I was lucky. I had the right people, and I really made a kind of gestural language of metaphors that showed what was going on between them. It works perfectly [in Bluebeard] because the singer who plays Bluebeard [Czaba Arizier] had studied dance in his youth, so he had some feeling for it. And the soprano [Natascha Petrinsky, who plays Bluebeard's wife] happens to be very talented at moving. She can really put the expressive content into her body.

DS: And what about the Gluck piece?

KA: It's quite similar. It also is an internal voyage. It's the story of Orpheus, who has lost the woman he loves and has to confront death. For me, every single character is a mental projection on his part. The Furies, for example, are Orpheus's own demons that he has to fight. He has to plunge down into his own depths to come to terms with this terrible, tragic event.

DS: And could you get those singers to move as well?

KA: In Italy, Orpheus is always sung by a woman since it was written originally for a castrato. The woman who played him in this [Elena Cassian] is Romanian, and she just looked like a Brancusi sculpture. She had real passion and guts, so she moved very well. Even more remarkable was the soprano who played Amor [Danielle de Niese]. Her parents are from Sri Lanka, and she has one of those bodies that can contort into any of the most difficult positions you've ever seen. I would say, "Okay, pull your foot up, touch your head, put your hands in this kind of Indian-dance configuration, and sing your aria."

DS: It sounds like you've just been going from strength to strength.

KA: I just learned how to push everything to the hilt. I always want to bring people into my world, so you have to use a lot of charm and psychology to make your collaborators want to do things. It's about finding ways to bring people into your daydream and make them participate.

DS: I assume that carries over to audiences as well, finding ways to bring the audience into your daydream.

KA: Hopefully, the sheer joy of a new experience should draw them in.

DS: You've been working a lot in France.

What are you doing there exactly?

KA: I've been doing pieces that are mostly about exploring a new dance vocabulary. I always think of them as dreams or daydreams. I think it's some kind of reflective investigation of trying to understand myself, trying to understand the world.

DS: I think of you as one of the most restless artists in any medium. You omnivorously turn to every genre of music and dance style. You were the first high-art choreographer--maybe the first choreographer of any kind--to seriously incorporate hip-hop into your work.

KA: Well, popular culture, of course, always has a great energy and life force. For some reason, I was at [the New York club] the Roxy the first time kids brought in turntables and did some scratching. I simply happened to be at the right place at the right time, so that was thrilling. I just thought it was high art. A specific vocabulary had been defined: The steps had names, the rhythms were very complicated, the style was totally defined. It was this incredibly defined art form that sprung up from nothing.