Armitage Gone! Dance appeared for a one-night only performance at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on Saturday. The seven-member dance company performed Ligeti Essays and Time is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood, two pieces that embody choreographer Karole Armitage’s vision of classical ballet fused with fierce contemporary.
At Saturday night’s performance, the audience was urged to not necessarily try to understand the meaning of the dances, but to try to feel them at a visceral, emotional level.
It was a surreal synthesis of art, dance and music.
In Ligeti Essays, David Salle’s set design created a space that mimicked the natural world. Against a black backdrop, the dancers moved across a luminescent floor. A solitary tree spread its leafless branches behind the fluid motion of their bodies. The simple black costumes reflected this theme.
There was an animal grace to the choreography. Arms stretched and contracted like the wings of birds in flight. Torsos arched with the fear of prey hunted. Legs moved with a careful, yet uncertain, prancing step like fawns picking their way through an unknown forest.
Yet, as much as the piece evoked nature, there was a wholly human feel to it as well. An undercurrent of sensuality flowed through the dancers’ bodies as they connected and disconnected through touch and isolation. A passionate range of flowed across the stage, from jubilance to anger and back to humor.
The music, composed by György Ligeti, reflected Armitage’s own style of innovation impressed upon the classic. At some moments nearly operatic, and at others merely percussion, the music punctuated the choreography like the dancers’ own heartbeats. The piece concluded with the clasping of hands and the dancers frolicking in circles like a Maypole dance celebrating nature and life.
The title for Time is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood was derived from the Philip Larkin poem “This is the First Thing.”
Both pieces approach themes of time and memory.
Again, Salle’s set design (here, in conjunction with Clifton Taylor), complimented the piece by encasing the stage with three walls of clear, beaded curtains, which the dancers used for entrances and exits. The fourth wall was opened to the audience.
The dance began with a sense of mystery and anticipation, with soloist Megumi Eda gliding across the dimly lit stage. Costumes were simple unitards, and their metallic hues of silver, gold, and copper against the dark backdrop lent a sense of progressive intensity to the piece.
The dancers’ bodies seemed to speak to each other through motion and balance. Their hyperextended limbs, reaching and grasping, spoke of longing and tension. The choreography of the piece swung from the slow, quiet steps of contemplation to the explosive, wild exertions of muscle, breath and being.
The dancers were occasionally joined into a writhing, serpentine rope of twitching bodies that reflected balance in both
human thought and the teetering physical body. The music was composed by Béla Bartók, and was a layering of string and percussion. The crescendos throughout the pieces were a perfect match with the choreography, and increased the feelings of anticipation and mystery with each new section of the dance.
This final dance closed the show to ecstatic applause and the graceful bowing of Armitage Gone!
Armitage was nicknamed “punk ballerina” by Vanity Fair in 1986, and it is easy to see why. Although her choreography is firmly rooted in the classical lines and motion of ballet she brings a progressive edge to her pieces, which urges audiences to perceive dance in new ways.
In creating a dance, Armitage says she is governed by the following principles: Seek beauty. Show mutability. Move like a blaze of consciousness. Perfection is the devil. Express the eroticism of gravity.
Armitage Gone! is a dance company that captures Armitage’s quest for balance and beauty, and delivers a brilliant breathlessness to the dance world.
