Biography
Artistic Director KAROLE ARMITAGE was rigorously trained in classical ballet and began her professional career in 1973 as a member of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, Switzerland, a company devoted exclusively to the repertory of George Balanchine. In 1976, she was invited to join Merce Cunningham’s company where she remained for five years, performing leading roles in Cunningham’s landmark works. Through her unique and acute knowledge of the aesthetic values of Balanchine and Cunningham, Armitage has created her own “voice” in the dichotomy of classical and modern and is seen is by some critics as the true choreographic heir to the two masters of twentieth-century American dance.
Known as the “punk ballerina,” Armitage created her first piece in 1978, followed by the iconic Drastic-Classicism in 1981. Throughout the 80s, she led her own New York-based dance company, Armitage Ballet. Following the premiere of The Watteau Duets at Dance Theater Workshop, Mikhail Baryshnikov invited her to create a work for American Ballet Theatre, and Rudolph Nureyev commissioned a work for the Paris Opera Ballet. Subsequently, she continued to work both in Europe and the US until 1996 when she was appointed Director of MaggioDanza in Florence, Italy. From 1999 to 2004, she was the resident choreographer of the Ballet de Lorraine in France and in 2005, served as the Director of the Venice Biennale Festival of Contemporary Dance. (Her work continues to tour throughout the Continent, performed by several European companies.) In 2004, her company made its debut at the Joyce Theatre and Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times wrote, “Karole Armitage’s Time is the echo of an axe within a wood…is one of the most beautiful dances to be seen in New York in a very long time.” After this successful season at the Joyce, Armitage’s focus shifted more to her New-York based company.
Armitage is renowned for pushing the boundaries to create contemporary works that blend dance, music and art. Inspired by disparate, non-narrative sources, from twentieth-century physics, to sixteenth-century Florentine fashion, to pop culture and new media, in her hands, the classical dance vocabulary is given a needed shock to its system with speed and fractured lines, abstractions, and symmetry countermanded by asymmetry. Music is her script and she has collaborated with contemporary and experimentalist composers such as Rhys Chatham, Lukas Ligeti and John Luther Adams. The scores can be marked by extreme lyricism as well as dissonance, noise, and polyrhythms. Sets and costumes for her works are often designed by leading artists in the contemporary art world, including Jeff Koons, David Salle, Philip Taaffe and Brice Marden.
As a true post-modernist, Armitage resides in both the esoteric and the popular, having choreographed two Broadway productions (Passing Strange and Hair which garnered her a TONY® nomination), works for Madonna and Michael Jackson and several Merchant-Ivory films. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Grand Prix Roscigno Danza (Italy), and in the spring of 2009, was awarded France’s most prestigious award, Commandeur dans L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Among the companies she has set new works on are: American Ballet Theatre, the Paris Opera Ballet; 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 Washington Ballet; Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; The Kansas City Ballet; the Bern Ballet and the Rambert Dance Company. She has directed operas from the baroque and contemporary repertoire for many of the prestigious houses of Europe including Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Lyric Opera in Athens and Het Muzik Theater in Amsterdam.
Her work has been the subject of two documentaries made for television: The South Bank Show (1985), directed by David Hinton and Wild Ballerina (1998), directed by Mark Kidel.
