Karole Armitage
She was named resident choreographer of the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, in 1999, where she remained until 2002, creating over 20 works for the company that toured throughout Europe.
Armitage is renowned for pushing boundaries to create works that blend dance, music, science, and art to engage in philosophical questions about the search for meaning.
[citation needed] Concepts such as “cubism in motion” are applied to group patterns, creating several vantage points so that movement is seen from multiple perspectives, angles, and levels, with planes bleeding into each other.
The dancers share a common purpose but do not dance in unison, producing a funky, democratic individuality with lyricism punctuated by raw, visceral accents.
Music is her script and she has collaborated with contemporary and experimentalist composers such as John Luther Adams, Thomas Adès, Rhys Chatham, Vijay Iyer, and Lukas Ligeti.
The scores can be marked by extreme lyricism as well as dissonance, noise and polyrhythms The sets and costumes for her works are often designed by leading artists in the contemporary art world, including Karen Kilimnik, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, David Salle, Phillip Taaffe and Brice Marden.
Film director James Ivory created sets and costumes for an evening of her choreography that was performed in Italy's historic Teatro della Pergola, built in 1656.
The work not only challenged formal notions of dance, but its imagery and content heralded the rise of themes relating to sexuality and gender that became so important in late 20thand early 21st Century discourse.
Salle's work, combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language, brought dazzlingly original sets and costumes to the stage.
The early Armitage/Salle collaborations were made in a free-spirited exploration of style, eras, pluralities and comparatives, embracing the contamination of languages in a mosaic of pattern.
Exploring American identity from the perspective of a culture using everything to sell products, Armitage and Salle's stage work created a contemplative universe awash in color.
The influence of Italian history, politics and aesthetics, living on the streets of Dante and Machiavelli, led to a third, poetic, period in Armitage's artistic thinking.
To complement her work with visual artists, Armitage began an ongoing collaboration with scientists, drawing upon conceptual ideas around time, space and geometry.
[citation needed] Concepts such as “cubism in motion” are applied to group patterns creating several vantage points so that movement is seen from multiple perspectives, angles and levels with planes bleeding into each other.
Itutu was an opportunity to "make these disparate, contradictory musical worlds mean something theatrical, exploring poly-visual dance and altered states of consciousness.
The piece, born out of Armitage's desire to embody core principles of physics, presented performing refreshingly virtuosic contemporary ballet choreography.
Dance were commissioned by the London Philharmonia to create Agon with music by Stravinsky, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen as part of their Myths and Rituals season.
These include the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Lyric Opera in Athens and Het Muzik Theater in Amsterdam.
Her most recent production of Orfeo ed Euridice for the Teatro di San Carlo Opera House in Naples from 2015 was filmed for RAI television and made into a DVD.
In 2007 Armitage directed and choreographed counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo's Princeton production of Zefirino - The Voice of a Castrato.
In 2015 Mana Contemporary presented Making Art Dance, an exhibition that surveyed 35 years of Armitage collaboration with artists and fashion designers in a 25,000 square foot gallery.
Salle created films, costumes, backdrops, sculpture, flats, and props for several incarnations of New York-based Armitage dance companies as well as for European ballet and opera productions.
Brice Marden created backdrops for the Italian production of Orfeo ed Eurdice in 2004 at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.
Karen Kilimnik created painted panels based on Domenico Tiepolo's Il Designi Di Pulcinella for Made in Naples in 2009.
Film director, James Ivory created sets and costumes for Armitage in Florence, Italy, as did Jean Paul Gaultier and Christina Lacroix.
Peter Speliopoulos, Creative Director of Donna Karan collaborated extensively to create costumes for Armitage productions from the mid-1990s and continues to do so today.
[4] Radcliffe Fellowship (2016) and Simons Public Humanities Fellowship (2016) As a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a Simons Fellow at The University of Kansas, Armitage explored ways to bring the unique point of view of Indigenous cultures into contemporary performance, focusing on the Aboriginal culture of the Kimberley region in Australia and the Kanza, Osage and Pawnee Plains Indian tribes in the United States.
