Karole Armitage

Karole Armitage (born March 3, 1954) is an American dancer and choreographer from Lawrence, Kansas who is based in New York. Armitage trained with a number of different companies, including the Geneva Opera Ballet and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and worked with influential dancers and choreographers including Rudolf Nureyev and David Salle. She mastered both ballet and modern dance before she began choreographing in her own right in 1978. Dubbed "The Punk Ballerina," Armitage made a name for herself combining classical ballet with techno music, colorful costumes, and the abstract body movements normally found in social dance. [Craine, Debra and Judith Mackrell, “Armitage, Karole,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Dance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 13, 2005.] She is currently the Artistic Director of "Armitage Gone! Dance," a company she founded in 2005.

Biography

Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Armitage began to study classical ballet at a young age. In 1973, she became a member of the prestigious Geneva ballet troupe led by George Balanchine, leaving the company two years later. In 1976, she turned to modern dance, becoming a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where she would remain until 1981. In 1978, she created her first own piece, "Ne", followed by "Drastic-Classicism" in 1981. Throughout the 1980s, Armitage led her own company, based in New York City. In 1984, she was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to create a work for the American Ballet Theatre; three years later, Rudolph Nureyev commissioned one of her works for the Paris Opera Ballet. [Citation|title=Biography|title=Armitage Gone! Dance Website|url=http://www.armitagegonedance.org/karole_armitage/bio.php|access-date=2008-08-04]

From 1995 to 1998, she served as the director and choreographer of the company MaggioDanza in Florence, Italy, moving on to become associate choreographer of the Bellet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, in 1999, where she was to remain until 2002. In 2004, she was the director of the International Festival of Contemporary Dance at the Venice Biennale. Returning to New York City after 15 years abroad, she founded her current company, Armitage Gone! Dance, in 2005. [Citation|last=Kim|first=Dave|title=Karole Armitage's Last Title|journal=Smyles & Fish|url=http://www.smylesandfish.com/lounge/karole-armitage.php|access-date=2008-08-05; Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).]

Work as choreographer

Armitage is known for her eclectic style, which caused Vanity Fair to dub her the "punk ballerina". [Citation|last=Kim|first=Dave|title=Karole Armitage's Last Title|journal=Smyles & Fish|url=http://www.smylesandfish.com/lounge/karole-armitage.php|access-date=2008-08-05] Her first piece, "Ne", was set to punk music and freely utilized neon lighting. She continued this style of combining classical ballet with punk in "Drastic Classicism", adding out-of-the-ordinary costumes to the mix. [Robert Greskovic, “Karole Armitage” in Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, electronic book edition, ed. Martha Bremser (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 22.]

In addition to punk, Armitage has worked with pop music, including choreography for Michael Jackson’s "In The Closet" and Madonna’s "Vogue", [“Dictionary of Dance: Karole Armitage,” Karole Armitage, http://www.answers.com/topic/karole-armitage-1?cat=entertainment (accessed April 22, 2008)] but also with classical music, such as that of composer György Ligeti ("Ligeti Essays") and, more recently, of György's son, Lukas Ligeti.

Armitage's eclecticism extends to all aspects of her work. Her dance style itself is modern punk with obvious classical roots, but also uses social dance and modern dance movements such as the arm flailing and flexed feet ("Rave"), and incorporates numerous aspects of classical ballet, such as lifts and the partnering style in her piece "Ligeti Essays". She requires the members of her company to be experienced in both modern dance and ballet, noting that "People who do only one or the other get left out." [Armitage quoted in Elizabeth Zimmer, “Taming the Gypsy in Her Soul,” Dance Magazine, February, 2007.]

Armitage's recent collaborators include British composer Thomas Adès, artist Jeff Koons, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix, Brice Marden, David Salle, Peter Speliopoulos, and Philip Taaffe. Her works incorporate multimedia through the use of strobe lights, background visualization screens and Technicolors. The themes of her pieces are as diverse as Audubon's Birds of America and, in a recent work inspired by and named after Brian Greene's popular science book The Elegant Universe and premiered at the 2008 World Science Festival, the physics of black holes and string theory. [Citation|last=Arcocella|first=Joan|title=Art meets Science|url=http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2008/06/02/080602gonb_GOAT_notebook_acocella |newspaper=The New Yorker|date=June 2, 2008|year=2008]

External links

* [http://www.karolearmitage.com Armitage GONE! Dance]
* [http://www.smylesandfish.com/lounge/karole-armitage.php profile of Karole Armitage] at "Smyles & Fish"
* [http://www.answers.com/topic/karole-armitage-1?cat=entertainment Karole Armitage on Answers.com]

References