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[DANCE REVIEW] Armitage Gone! Dance at Jacob's Pillow

8.4.06
JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE
Armitage Gone! Dance
Doris Duke Studio Theatre
August 3-6, 2006

PROGRAM:

In This Dream That Dogs Me (Excerpt)
Choreography by Karole Armitage
Music by Annie Gosfield

Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood (Excerpt)
Choreography by Karole Armitage
Music by Bela Bartok

review by SETH ROGOVOY, critic-at-large, BERKSHIRE LIVING MAGAZINE

(Becket, Mass., August 4, 2006) -- After a decade-plus self-imposed European exile, "punk ballerina" Karole Armitage is back on these shores, and with her is a new company molded in her fashion, with a series of new and striking works, including two that are being given partial showcases at Jacob's Pillow this weekend. In tandem with the program on the Pillow's main stage, featuring the Trey McIntyre Project, these pieces are highly suggestive of where modern ballet and heavily ballet-influenced modern dance are at the moment, and where they might be going.

In Armitage's case, while her female dancers aren't on pointe (as are McIntyre's for much of the time), there are still plenty of references to and uses of the balletic vocabulary in her works, which, other than for the lack of point, at its most extreme can seem like ballet on steroids. Armitage favors taut, muscular bodies -- the phenomenally ripped Theresa Ruth Howard displayed some muscles I never even knew existed on the side of her hips -- and much of her choreography builds on pairings -- duets, trios, and more -- and includes lifts, twirls, and all manner of interlocking activity that both is and isn't balletic.

This was especially the case in In This Dream That Dogs Me, danced within a red-curtained box designed by artist David Salle, with dancers wrapped tightly in iridescent blue bikinis or monokinis. Color also plays an important part in Armitage's aesthetic, and it's not confined to her costumes -- in a world where so many companies tend toward monochromism of skin color, Armitage flaunts the beauty inherent in skin color, with dancers ranging from the blackest of black to all shades of brown leaning towards white (she even found an Israeli-raised Filipino). Equally noteworthy is her use of height, with her half-dozen or so dancers ranging the gamut from very tall to very short. Armitage doesn't just leave that on the stage for you to put together, either, but integrates the height differential right into the choreography, with shorter dancers walking right underneath the stretched out arms of taller ones, or taller ones bending down to pat the shorter ones on the head in almost condescending, humorous gestures.

All her dancers are remarkably powerful, and bodies were lifted and tossed as easily as women did vertical splits. In This Dream That Dogs Me was powered by Annie Gosfield harsh, industrial music, and the dancers responded with set pieces that mimicked industrial, pre-fab movements emphasizing repetitive, assembly line gestures that twisted interlocking bodies.

Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood, danced to Bela Bartok's gorgeous, textural "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta," inside a box, also designed by Salle, constructed out of metallic-like, free-hanging ropes, used similar techniques to convey abstract notions of power relationships, often verging on stylized renditions of martial arts postures and sexual congress.

In all, it was a striking, provocatively powerful evening of dance. And in tandem with McIntyre at the Ted Shawn Theatre, it's a mini-course in the state of the art of ballet-influenced modern dance.

-- review by SETH ROGOVOY, critic-at-large, BERKSHIRE LIVING MAGAZINE





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