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Published on 5/17/08
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Karole Armitage, whose three-year old New York-based company Armitage Gone! makes its Chicago debut at the Dance Center Thursday 17, first gained the public’s attention with her pivotal 1981 piece Drastic Classicism. In that duet, guitarist Rhys Chatham’s earsplitting riffs were juxtaposed with Armitage’s aggressively performed pointework. While time has smoothed that jagged edge with a lusher kind of beauty, she claims the basis of her artistry has not changed. “I have always been thinking about how to extend classical dance into the contemporary arena,” Armitage says.
To that end, her choreography has evolved. “The dance steps have become more about geometric curvature and sinuous shapes,” she says. “Movement is traced and the path traveled is more important than arriving there. All of this adds up to a kind of work that is more existential than it was in the early days.”
Armitage’s oeuvre, like that of her longtime collaborator, painter David Salle, has elements of collage. First trained as a ballet dancer, Armitage was influenced by the explosive creativity of punk rock in New York City in the late 1970s, when she also danced for the modernist Merce Cunningham (“He taught me perseverance,” she says). Her own choreographic work caught the eye of Mikhail Baryshnikov, who commissioned a work from her for American Ballet Theatre in 1984.
Rudolf Nureyev later invited her to make a work for the Paris Opera Ballet, and Armitage began to find more and more work in Europe, where much of her current aesthetic was shaped. “There’s less economic pressure,” says Armitage of the dance scene abroad. “The audience is very comfortable with the idea that art is about change rather than tradition. [People] make a place for tradition and then hope everything else adds new ideas.”
Armitage Gone! adds new ideas to the Dance Center Thursday 17 through Saturday 19.
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