Armitage's Brazen Classicism
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance ARMITAGE'S BRAZEN CLASSICISM BY LAURA A. JACOBS IN late January Manhattan's Joyce Theater hosted a week-long series of performances by the Armitage Ballet. Artistic director and...
...Of the three Armitage ballets performed at the Joyce, only The Watteau Duets, an older, pre-company work, held together asafluidpatternof formal relations...
...His steps have the simple ardor of Brueghel's dancing peasants...
...Despite their kinetic interest, they often fail to engage the imagination as well as the eye...
...For him the breakdown of connections is a step toward truth, a spur to a renewed sense of sight...
...they're more like laboratory cultures grown strangely out of control...
...More worrisome, however, is that her sense of mission—to deliver unto us a "new American classicism"—may be keeping her from making dances natural to her gifts...
...Armitage's dances, in contrast to Morns', don't seem to spring full-blown from the brow...
...The idea of The Watteau Duets was clear: Armitage was traveling through a museum of female iconography, doing ferocious battle with gender reduction...
...Artistic director and founder Karole Armitage stands in a long line of dancers—especially female dancers—who have made their way into choreography by following subversive inclinations...
...I find distracting her continual listing of influences and her talk about how "classical" she is...
...Striding about on groundgulping pointes, she has the urgency of a messenger—you can't help but lean in closer to see what she has to communicate...
...Yet it was anything but fingerpopping...
...If anyone out there still thinks women are the weaker vessel, he hasn't seen this dance...
...She's a modern ballerina who rejects the imperial posturing historically associated with her art without yielding to the postmodern masses...
...Salle designs sets and costumes for Armitage, and one feels his influence on her recent choreography as well—not the happiest development...
...She seems to be missing what Morris has in abundance: a vision of the world, replete with all the passion and wisdom an artist not yet 30 can muster...
...Here is a vision we can share in...
...Armitage's brazen impulses—and by inference those of her generation—became her own best subject...
...the dances, as a consequence, tend to share the same nervous system...
...Watching some of Armitage's dances you sense less that she has a story to tell than a style in which she loves to move...
...So has Mark Morris, another young classicist [see "Mixed Mark Morris,"NL, January 13,1986...
...Had the choreographer gone further in her exploration of Saland's stealthy dark beauty and cryptic stage persona, Stances might not have seemed so slight...
...For all his nihilistic trappings, Morris is ambitious in a traditional way, and this gives his creations a certain fullness...
...Her ballet for ABT, The Mollino Room, was a wonderful success because she had Baryshnikov as a generating force and focus...
...Watteau is similarly effective because it fixes on the ballerina as an emblem of the feminine mystique and, without digressing, steadily enlarges it...
...indeed she would do better to go in the other direction...
...Armitage crafts balletic skeins of extreme, cerebral sinuousness...
...Yet so keen is her sense of rhythm that when she snaps back her shoulders there is something almost repellent about the movement, as if the devil were jerking her leash...
...It is as though Armitage has drawn the ballet technique through the vacuum spiral of a time machine: Connector steps come unglued, classic poses ice over and traditional symmetries lose pressure, becoming simultaneously freer and more venomously air-eating...
...Their differences are instructive...
...A stageful of her dancers is a far cry from the ballet corps' pretty pink ciphers—they're amazons, feminists, poison butterflies hovering just beyond the net...
...Mollino had the kind of scale and articulation, the hidden layers of meaning and swirls of emotion, that can only be realized through sustained concentration—Baryshnikov's genius and Armitage's response...
...Each piece by Morris has distinctive period character and chemistry: He can place a dance historically two measures into the score...
...As in a Balanchine pas dedeux, no amount of rough and tumble can dissolve the ineffable link between the dancers or dispel the drama inherent in small gestures: a hand laid on the small of the back, a thumb and forefinger locking around a wrist...
...Saland was ravishing, her discreet introversion accentuated by the pas de deux Armitage fashioned for her, all silky inward spirals and tricky handling...
...Armitage does not need fragmentation as a compositional catalyst at the moment...
...In a world critically short on talented ballet choreographers, Karole Armitage has attracted notice...
...The black satin slips worn by the women in Stances made chanteuses of them and heightened the dance hall atmosphere of the choreography, with its cancan kicks and tousled skirts...
...Nevertheless, the effect frequently falls short...
...After a few years of successful dancing with Merce Cunningham's company, she left it too, turning up next in her own dances as a prima in punk trappings: hair shorn, toe shoes blackened, rock band blaring...
...This isn't necessarily bad, for the dynamic is consistently exciting...
...Though not an exceptional dancer technically, Armitage has a peculiar charisma that makes her easy to watch: At once soft and towering, she comes on like an irradiated siren...
...The idea was to blast classicism into the '80s by blending ballet's codified syntax and Cunningham's nonlinear compositional esthetic in the centrifugal din of the decade...
...Armitage left the Geneva Ballet in 1974...
...Hipsters looked much like a meeting ground between George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham—the place where Armitage would probably like to stake her claim...
...Armitage can be credited with having invented some lovely poses and serenely erotic movements for her couples, but on the whole Hipsters proceeded with a painstaking seriousness that magnified both its emptiness and its rather conventional construction...
...The program ended with Les Stances à Sophie, a well-crafted and attractively unostentatious trifle that gave us Stephanie Saland, guesting from the New York City Ballet (along with partner Robert La Fosse), to feast our eyes on...
...Armitage changed costume with each duet, her gear ranging from the gladiator pointe-boots and helmet of the opener, to the simple leotard and orange face-covering veil worn in a later duet (perhaps a nod to Martha Graham and her veiled, pining heroines), to the five-inch stilettos that substituted for the pointe-boots in the finale...
...With Morris, the choreographic phrases seem to come spinning, pouring, flooding out of his music in the plain language of muscle and bone...
...Often—and one notes the Cunningham influence here—they have only a tenuous connection to what is happening aurally (and that might be a recorded comedy sketch or dialogue instead of music...
...Armitage relies less on history than on her personal dynamic...
...What distinguishes Armitage from so many other young choreographers battling the forces of inarticulation on small stages everywhere is her vocabulary, which derives from the classical ballet...
...Armitage's fiancé and artistic advisor, New York painter David Salle, is known for making multi-panel pictures that juxtapose contrasting styles and symbols...
...With her long, intriguingly modeled limbs and finetuned torso, she can reach into the ozone...
...Watteau was preceded by Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger Poppin' Daddies, a dance that began with music by Anton Webern, ended with Igor Stravinsky, and had a comic monologue by Lord Buckley sandwiched in the middle...
...Armitage is not shy with reporters and has been much quoted, especially since choreographing for Mikhail Baryshnikov at the American Ballet Theatre last spring...
...Set to elegantly abrasive rock music by David Linton (performed by Tom Goldstein and Thad Wheeler), Watteau took the form of an extended pas de deux in fivesections, all danced by the choreographer with various male partners...
...Armitage's works are spare and teasingly avant-garde—they hang funny...
...In Watteau we see that love remains a manacle and a mystery, no matter how aggressive and fearful of commitment the lovers become...
...Female-male, image-flesh, desirerepulsion—these dualities were bound in a dance that outwardly scored the battle of the sexes...
...Overly somber and bloated, Hipsters' heart was crushed by its own weighty pretension...
Vol. 70 • February 1987 • No. 2
