Karole Armitage (born March 3, 1954) is an American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She is artistic director of Armitage Gone! Dance, a contemporary dance company that performs in New York City and internationally. Dubbed the “punk ballerina” in the 1980s, she earned a Tony nomination for her choreography of the Broadway musical Hair.
Early life and early career Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Armitage grew up dividing her time in two places: Gothic, Colorado, and Lawrence, Kansas. Armitage began studying ballet in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of four with former New York City Ballet dancer Tomi Wortham, followed by classes in Crested Butte, Colorado with Shirley Strabhaur. She continued her studies with Ballet West in Aspen and Salt Lake City, at the School of American Ballet, the Harkness House in New York City, at North Carolina School of the Arts, and with Léonide Massine in London.
Armitage began her professional career in 1973 as a member of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland. The company, directed by George Balanchine and Patricia Neary, was rooted in the Balanchine aesthetic and devoted exclusively to his repertory. There she performed many Balanchine masterworks including Agon, The Four Temperaments and Serenade. In 1975 she became a Swiss citizen and holds dual citizenship with the US. From 1976 to 1981 she was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing leading roles across the globe.
In 1978, she created her first piece Ne, followed by Drastic-Classicism in 1981. Throughout the 1980s, Armitage led her own company based in New York City. Her company was known for its collaborations with artists David Salle and Jeff Koons. In 1984, she was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to create a work for the American Ballet Theatre. Three years later, Rudolf Nureyev commissioned one of her works for the Paris Opéra Ballet. She created five ballets for the Ballet de l'Opéra National de Paris during the 1980s, leading to commissions in the US and Europe which she pursued throughout the 1990s.
Armitage was named artistic director and choreographer of MaggioDanza (1995–1998) the ballet company at the Opera House in Florence, Italy, where she choreographed, curated and presented classical repertoire, modern masters and contemporary works.
She was named resident choreographer of the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, in 1999, where she remained until 2002, creating over 20 works for the company.
In 2004, she served as the artistic director of the Venice Biennale International Festival of Contemporary Dance, inviting companies from across the globe to showcase innovative dance throughout the city.
Armitage GONE! Dance Returning to New York City in 2004, Armitage founded her current company, Armitage Gone! Dance. It is administered by the Armitage Foundation a 501 (c) not- for-profit foundation based in New York City.
Armitage Gone! Dance is based at Mana Contemporary.
Choreographic style "Karole Armitage is renowned for pushing boundaries to create works that blend dance, music, science, and art to engage in philosophical questions about the search for meaning. Armitage movement looks spontaneous despite its rigorous craftsmanship. Concepts such as “cubism in motion” are applied to group patterns, creating several vantage points so that movement is seen from multiple perspectives, angles, and levels, with planes bleeding into each other. The steps are based on calligraphy and fractal geometry (that of clouds, mountains, seashores), creating a sinuous, curvilinear vocabulary unlike the Euclidian geometry of dance tradition. The dancers share a common purpose but do not dance in unison, producing a funky, democratic individuality with lyricism punctuated by raw, visceral accents."—Harvard Radcliffe InstituteAccording to her official bio, she is inspired by disparate, non-narrative sources, from 20th century physics, to 16th century Florentine fashion, to pop culture and new media. She has collaborated with contemporary and experimentalist composers such as John Luther Adams, Thomas Adès, Rhys Chatham, Vijay Iyer, and Lukas Ligeti. The sets and costumes for her works are often designed by leading artists in the contemporary art world, including Karen Kilimnik, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, David Salle, Phillip Taaffe and Brice Marden. She has also collaborated with fashion designers Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Peter Speliopoulos. Film director James Ivory created sets and costumes for an evening of her choreography that was performed in Italy's historic Teatro della Pergola.
Armitage's choreography can be divided into three distinct, aesthetic periods: punk, picture, and poetry.
Punk
Armitage joins a long lineage of artists looking at the past at the same time as they seek to dismantle it. Her early work fused Merce Cunningham's aesthetics with an ebullient, joyous, punk-inspired jubilation in destroying the old to bring in the new. The work not only challenged formal notions of dance, but its imagery and content heralded the rise of themes relating to sexuality and gender that became so important in late 20thand early 21st Century discourse. She changed the idea of the ballerina, portraying her as independent thinker with an erotic appetite, rather than as an unobtainable, romantic ideal. In 1980 she put a man in a skirt on the stage as a matter of fact, rather than as drag.
In 1982, Armitage was inspired to examine her roots as a classical ballet dancer after creating three new works for the Paris Opera Ballet at the invitation of Rosella Hightower and Rudolph Nureyev. She combined Balanchine's poetic refinement and brilliant phrase making with Cunningham's use of stage space as a field of action. Her controversial recipe combining the warring factions of ballet and modern dance injected with hard rock energy and the taboo of sexual content, gave dance a much needed shock to its systems with speed, fractured lines, off-balance movement, abstractions and symmetry countermanded by asymmetry and punch.
Picture
In 1984 Armitage met painter, David Salle, at a post performance dinner that included the choreographer, Yvonne Rainer. The meeting led to the second period in Armitage's aesthetic development as Armitage and Salle began a collaboration that continues to this day. Salle's work, combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language, brought dazzlingly original sets and costumes to the stage. The early Armitage/Salle collaborations were made in a free-spirited exploration of style, eras, pluralities and comparatives, embracing the contamination of languages in a mosaic of pattern. The divisions between ballet and modern, high and low, serious and banal disappeared through collage, juxtaposition and humor. Armitage and her dancers performed to spoken text, classical and popular music, jazz, world music and silence. Exploring American identity from the perspective of a culture using everything to sell products, Armitage and Salle's stage work created a contemplative universe awash in color. Though Armitage found consumer culture's influence on the creation of self disturbing, her collaboration with Salle was done, not in the spirit of the social critique, but in the spirit of the artist struggling for form, for the new, for the experimental.
Jeff Koons joined Salle in designing several Armitage productions. The first collaboration in 1988 resulted in Gogo Ballerina for which Koons and Salle shared the costume design while Koons created sets. Armitage worked closely with Koons discussing themes and content for the new work, inspiring the creation of large, interactive sets for the piece. Her dancers used them physically: emerging from a black, heart-shaped chocolate box, dancing on illuminated gogo boxes with red plexiglas bears, hearts, and flowers and breaking apart a large, extravagant cake. The Koons sets were destroyed in the early 2000s when the expense of storage became prohibitive. Salle and Koons worked together again in 1989 on Contempt, Overboard (1991) and The Predators’ Ball/Hucksters of the Soul (1996) where both contributed set and costumes.
Poetry
In 1995 Armitage was invited to direct the Ballet of Florence, Italy (known as MaggioDanza). The influence of Italian history, politics and aesthetics, living on the streets of Dante and Machiavelli, led to a third, poetic, period in Armitage's artistic thinking. She began to work with a minimum of ingredients to engage in philosophical questions about the search for meaning. Her ideas continued to develop while living in Naples working for the Teatro di San Carlo and in Venice where she directed the Venice International Biennale of Contemporary Dance. Her long collaboration with fashion designer Peter Speliopoulos began in 2000 with The Birds, created for the Greek National Ballet in Athens. He designed over 30 Armitage productions in opera and dance for important theaters in Europe including productions in France when Armitage served as resident choreographer for the Ballet de Lorraine (1999–2004). Their collaboration forms a significant role in the third period of Armitage's work.
Upon her return to New York in 2004, Armitage relaunched Armitage Gone! Dance in a period of intense creativity. To complement her work with visual artists, Armitage began an ongoing collaboration with scientists, drawing upon conceptual ideas around time, space and geometry. In this new phase, Armitage created movement that looks spontaneous and personal, despite it is rigorous craftsmanship. Here dance, light, music, and design are unified into a balanced whole. Concepts such as “cubism in motion” are applied to group patterns creating several vantage points so that movement is seen from multiple perspectives, angles and levels with planes bleeding into each other. The steps themselves are based on calligraphy and fractal geometry (the geometry of nature: clouds, mountains, seashores) creating a sinuous, curvilinear vocabulary unlike the Euclidean geometry of the dance tradition. In her work, the dancers share a common purpose but do not dance in unison. Her spatial design is both elaborate and cohesive, producing a funky, democratic individuality. Extreme lyricism is punctuated by raw, violent accents.
Music Armitage has choreographed to silence, used text as a score, worked with punk, rock, rap, electronic dance music and commissioned new scores. She searches for music that has a lot of space and silence, allowing the audience to see dance as a primary source of communication. Armitage has also worked with classical music, such as that of composers Béla Bartók (Time is the echo of an axe within a wood, György Ligeti (Ligeti Essays) and, more recently of György's son, Lukas Ligeti. In a conversation with Lukas Ligeti for BOMB Magazine, Armitage described the challenge of choreographing Itutu. Itutu is a dance piece set to both Ligeti's own compositions and those of Burkina Electric, a band based in Burkina Faso. Ligeti works with electronica and Burkinabe popular music in collaboration with the dancer-musicians in the group. Itutu was an opportunity to "make these disparate, contradictory musical worlds mean something theatrical, exploring poly-visual dance and altered states of consciousness."
Dance Commissions
Armitage has created dances for numerous companies including the Paris Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, The Tasmanian Dance Company, Extemporary Dance Company, England, The White Oak Dance Project, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Lyon Opera Ballet, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, The Greek National Ballet, the Washington Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Kansas City Ballet, the Bern Ballet, The Washington Ballet, Balletto Teatro di Torino, Rambert Dance Company, Introdans in Holland and the Boston Ballet.
Dance and Science