 |
ARMITAGE GONE! DANCEin residence: august 16 - 30performances: august 25 and 27 |
Overview
Overview
in residence: august 16 - 30
performances: thursday, august 25 at 6pm and saturday, august 27 at 6pm
Armitage Gone! Dance will be working on two projects while in residency at Vineyard Arts Project. The first is a site-specific ballet in collaboration with film director, James Ivory, for the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy in the fall of 2011. The ballet celebrates the 500th anniversary of Giorgio Vasari’s birth. The homage will use dance, music and large-scale projections to bring the accomplishments of Vasari to the attention of a contemporary public. The celebration aims to honor Vasari and showcase his range of activities as a writer, artist, architect, stage designer, thinker and inventor of art history. The spectacle will culminate in a scene that not only celebrates Vasari and his many accomplishments, but also honors the 150th anniversary of the formation of Italy as a nation.
The company is also rehearsing repertoire for a celebratory fall tour to Europe. The tour culminates in Milan with a week long retrospective commemorating the company’s ten-years of creativity. The three programs include Three Theories, a an evening –length ballet on theoretical physics; Trance Pop Punk with repertoire from the 1980s through the latest new ballet, Gaga-Gaku from 2011 and Itutu, a collaboration with Burkina Electric, the riveting African pop group from Burkina Faso use fuse the ancient Burkinabé rhythms of Burkina Faso with western club electronica.
The Company
The Company:
ARMITAGE GONE! DANCE was formed in 2001 when Karole Armitage returned to the U.S. after 15 years of working in Europe. For the first two years, the company created one production annually for seven dancers. In 2004 this culminated in the creation of the company’s acclaimed ballet, Time is the echo of an axe within a wood. Armitage Gone! Dance was officially launched in 2005 with an unprecedented three-week season at The Duke on 42nd Street Theater, followed by a commissioned dance for Works & Process at The Guggenheim Museum. The excitement generated by these engagements led to performances in Italy, France, Mexico and then to tours throughout the United States and Europe for the next several years. In 2010 the company added dancers to become the eleven- member company of today. Karole Armitage formed her first company, Armitage Gone! in New York City in 1979 to critical acclaim. The company toured to festivals and venues worldwide, taking the name The Armitage Ballet in 1985, to perform works in collaboration with visual artists David Salle and Jeff Koons. Throughout the 1990’s, Ms. Armitage chose to maintain her company on a project basis while accepting commissions from European ballet and opera companies.
Armitage Gone! Dance has received a number of prestigious awards and commissions including two National Dance Project Awards, support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, a Multi-Arts Production Fund Award, and commissions from the Guggenheim’s Works and Process program, The Joyce Theater’s Cathy and Stephen Weinroth Fund for New Works, the Teatro Massimo Vincenzo Bellini di Catania, in Italy, Lincoln Center for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Napoli Teatro Festival Italia, BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College and a commission for a new work for the 2011 Summerstages performances in Central Park followed by a 2011 tour to Europe and the US. The tour culminates in Milan with a week long retrospective celebrating the company’s ten-years of creativity. For more information visit www.armitagegonedance.org.
Karole Armitage
Karole Armitage, Artistic Director
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: the Bolshoi Ballet, Moscow, 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. Upcoming projects include choreography for The Cunning Little Vixen presented by the NY Philharmonic in June at Avery Fisher Hall, choreography for a film musical aimed exclusively for the Chinese market called The Thief, choreography for the musical Pretty Filthy about the LA porn industry produced by the Civilians/Center Theatre Group in LA and choreography for the 2012 Cirque du Soleil tent production.
Christina Johnson
Christina Johnson, Rehearsal Director
Rehearsal director CHRISTINA JOHNSON began her professional career at age 17. She was a member of the Boston Ballet before joining the Dance Theatre of Harlem where in her 13-year tenure she became a principal dancer and danced many leading roles. She was a founding member of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, as well as a member of the Swiss companies, the Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve and Ballett Basel. She has worked with distinguished choreographers and coaches such as Frederic Franklin, Suzanne Farrell, Jerome Robbins, William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Ohad Naharin, Dwight Rhoden, to name a few. Her diverse repertoire includes classical and contemporary ballet, as well as modern dance. After a 25-year performing career Christina uses her wide range of experience and knowledge to teach and coach dancers worldwide. She weaves together the discipline and focus of a solid classical ballet training with the expansive and vast movement vocabulary of contemporary and modern dance.
