I can count on one hand the times when I’ve seen art that instantaneously changed my life. One came nearly 30 (!) or so years ago when Karole Armitage ripped up the stage with her toes at Tribeca’s TR3. Not literally of coufrse. Armitage, a ballerina turned principal  in Merce Cunningham’s dance company, was performing with her then boyfriend Rhys Chatham. She was a sliver (still is), a spiky silver blonde in black stretch leotard and toe shoes; Chatham, not quite a punk, stood next to her on the tiny stage playing what seemed (and I later learned was indeed) a single note tuned across all six strings of a highly amplified electric guitar, unmoving, unreadable, save for a cheshire grin. Armitage spun like a top, toppling over, en pointe, while Chatham buzzed away. It was—and even today still would be—like nothing I’d ever seen before in dance.

The piece—it later turned into something called “Drastic Classicism”—was in embryo at TR3. Just being there to watch dance was somehow nuts. I saw Martin Atkins of Brian Brain and PIL, and A Certain Ratio and Young Marble Giants there. Those were the good old days of what we’d now call “post-punk.” And Armitage fit in just fine. She was, in her way, as punk as could be. Noir punk. Angry punk. Post punk. Except of course that it was  dance, and no punks I know (maybe Richard Hell or Tom Verlaine) would have been caught dead within a mile of dance, unless of course it was the pogo.

I was mesmerized by Armitage. I could tell right away she was the real thing, not just a genuinely amazing dancer but an artist with real punkish sensitivities, only applied to dance instead of to music. As dancer in Cunningham’s company, she always stood out, with a kind of wink when she moved. On her own, she seemed set on breaking as many taboos of modern and classic dance as she could. She worked with loud, amplified, tuneless punk musicians in a punk idiom—and meant it. She danced in nightclub—and bathed in cool. And she liberally sprinkled classical and modern dance moves together, and in toe shoes no less, with something that looked like real sexuality, not just a playacting. (She and Chatham were a couple then.)

It may not sound like much of a revolution today, ok. But Armitage, a former ballerina at the Ballet du Grand Theatre in Geneva who had somehow wound up worshipping at the Cunningham/Cage temple of modern art, had a twitchiness and quiet coolness about her—she’s from Kansas, that was part of it—that suggested the mien of a ballerina killer. Her choreography was aimed, very intentionally, like someone holding a loaded gun, at both ballet and modern dance, and she was shooting it. Shooting her daddies. Killing her audiences. Pushing down Cunningham’s elegant isolation of music and dance with moments where the dancer and the musician were deliberately banging on each other, and playing each other’s instruments, literally and figuratively. She certainly slayed me. In 1986, she was the subject of my first feature for Vanity Fair. (By that time, I had also played in—and been fired from—Chatham’s band, but that’s another story.) The title of the piece, which she’s probably stuck with for life was “Punk Ballerina.” I’m not sure if I should take credit or blame for that.

Punx redunx?

OK, flash forward 30 years. Armitage has been through a lot: long fruitful collaborations with her (now ex-) boyfriend (and her still very good friend) David Salle, artists from Baryshnikov to Koons, Marden, and Clemente, designers such as Gaultier and Lacroix, and a decade of work with European dance companies, leading to commissions, directorships, operas, ballets, and even the most prestigious arts award of France, the Commandeur dans l’Order des Arts et des Lettres. Five or so years ago, she came back to the States, started her own company, Armitage Gone! Dance (don’t ask me about that exclamation mark), and has produced several seasons of critically acclaimed (and well supported) work. In other words, not very punkish. Except for the last two weeks, when she revived her punk days as “Think Punk!”–another exclamation point!—at The Kitchen.

I suspected the worst: Revivals are usually bids for fame or money, and there was a whiff of retrospective theatricality about the thing. You can’t revive punk, you can only live it. In this sense, the punks who laughed at the idea of a punk danceuse 30 years ago were absolutely right. Dance is shot through with bourgeois affectation, no two ways about it. ( I once told the loony, now much celebrated Vivienne Westwood that I was writing about dance and performance art, and she just refused to understand it:  “Why are you so boring!” over and over and over; I ultimately came to agree with her About dance, not about me. ) So there was some Billy Idol sneering and some West Side Story sneering, a lot of hair gel on the men, and some heroically buffed bodies instead of the lithe, ballet bodies of yesteryear.

But a lot was still as pristine and perfect as it was 30 years ago. The music was loud. The dancing was hot. “Drastic Classicism” still had the power of its irreverence and faux anarchy (how anarchic can a choreographed punk ballet be?) with the dancers joining the faux Chatham band (who were terrific) in the musical maelstrom.  “The Watteau Duets” with Giorgia Bova and Matthew Prescott, still had just as much sex power as Armitage once had with Joe Lennon—just as orgasmic and exhausting, albeit with David Linton’s thrilling and terrific score now turned into a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern shtick. (Although perhaps that’s just how it was.) An excerpt from a new piece, “Mashup,” with the mighty sax of X-Ray Spex’s Lora Logic mashed together with Mozart’s Symphonie Concertante (Balanchine once choreographed it), was lovely—but it was so nice. What do you expect from 2009, from the age of mashups anyway? (Although it would be interesting to channel punkish anger through a web sensibility—is that TV on the Radio—punk and social media are at opposite ends of the spectrum in many ways.)

Although. We seem to be returning to a set of political and economic circumstances somewhat similar to what produced the punk explosion. Unfortunately, you can’t revive staged ballet anger as if you were doing Rent. It’s not a Broadway show, not that that’s what Armitage was trying to do. It turns out yhe punks had it right: Dance is too propped up by money, by needing to appeal to funders (is that why we were seeing an excerpt from a coming work—to raise money?) “Think[ing] Punk!” turns out be very specifically located in historical terms. For punk to be drastic again, it has to exist, as Joe Strummer once said, “outside the law.” Still it’s nice to see someone turning over old broken ground, and to hear the buzzing in your ears again the next morning.

3/6/09 The New York Times review of Armitage. (inserted 3/22)

Update: Last week I read that Armitage actually did choreograph the new Broadway version of Hair

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• Think Punk!: Members of NY Experimental Music Scene Discover Passion for Modern Dance in Remake of K (idiomag.com)
• Karole Armitage fuses the cerebral and the sensual – Los Angeles Times Blogs (netnewmusic.net)
• Dance Review | Armitage Gone! Dance: Even After All This Time, Attitude Still Abounds (nytimes.com)
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Tagged: ballet, Dance, HAIR, Karole Armitage, Merce Cunningham, Noise NY, postmodern dance, postpunk, Punk, West Side Story

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