Dance

Think Punk Dance

Rock n roll ballerina Karole Armitage at the Kitchen

by Meryl Cates   |   Feb 25, 2009

Think Punk Dance

Armitage Gone! Dance Company performing Watteau Duets (Photo: Lois Greenfield)

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It has been thirty prolific years since Karole Armitage presented her first choreographic piece Ne in 1978. Thereafter, she worked extensively in Europe creating dances for major ballet and opera companies and was commissioned back to New York for a new piece in 2004. Hailed for her choreographic flair, she founded Armitage Gone! Dance (a full-time company in New York) in 2005.

Armitage Gone! Dance will present their New York season March 4–14 at The Kitchen with four works, one of which is a world premiere. The season titled, Think Punk!, is surely a play on Armitage’s moniker the “punk ballerina,” coined by Vanity Fair in the 1980s, if not a perfectly compact description of the works themselves.

“Karole got her start performing at The Kitchen in the early 1980s, and she actually approached us initially about the idea of her returning,” said Debra Singer, Executive Director and Chief Curator. “Given her history with the institution, it seemed like The Kitchen would be an exciting and appropriate context to take a fresh look at some of her really early work and present that alongside something new.”

The evening-length program is set up like a chronological map of Armitage’s choreographing career, beginning with Drastic Classicism (created in 1981), The Watteau Duets (1985), Wild Thing (1897), and finally Mashup in its world premiere.

Drastic Classicism features manipulated classical vocabularyperformed to the music of Rhys Chatham. The Watteau Duets, described as deconstructing the ballet pas de deux, is set to the music of David Linton and caught the attention of Mikhail Baryshnikov (then Artistic Director of American Ballet Theatre) during its debut performance at Dance Theater Workshop. Wild Thing is performed to the music of Jimi Hendrix, and finally there’s the premiere, Mashup, a full company piece shaped by the work of French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. The original score, composed by Daniel Iglesia, is a fusion of Mozart and punk rock group X-Ray Spex.

Regarded as a pioneer of ballet esthetics, the season should be a recap and celebration of her unique creativity.