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Karole Armitage and Michael Clark aesthetic persuasions are making works for superbly trained dancers with multiple performance skills - in different dance genres, but also in sports, gymnastics, acrobatics, even circus arts. Like the omnicompetent dancer, the dance itself has become a multimedia event, a polymorphous meeting ofall the arts in the lived moment, in the singularly postrnodern presence of performance. 35 Classical Brinksmanship: Karole Armitage and Michael Clark There are times, it seems, when the classical tradition in dance needs massive shocks to the system to renew itself. Karole Armitage and Michael Clark, working on opposite sides ofthe Atlantic, in their separate ways, keep dreaming up those shocks. Like Diaghilev in an earlier era of crisis, Armitage and Clark both understand the need to infuse the dance performance with the tonic verve ofthe other contemporary arts. But also, as exemplary postmodernists ofthe 1980s, they traffic in a different kind ofastonishment, one that wryly mixes classicism and kitsch, the high modern and the vulgar, abstraction with eroticism, the beautiful with the satanic - and the sardonic . Both Armitage and Clark have been commissioned to bring their wrenching, revitalizing spirits to major ballet companies-Armitage has worked with the Paris Opera Ballet and last year made a dance for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the American Ballet Theatre; Clark has choreographed for the Scottish Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, London Festival Ballet and Ballet Rambert. But as they dance here in Los Angeles with their own, smaller companies, one can see how they bring a classical spirit-especially discernible in their own dancing - to invigorate modern dance as well. Armitage was born in Kansas in 1955 and studied ballet as a child with a transplanted former New York City Ballet dancer. Abroad with her family at sixteen, she joined the Geneva Ballet, dancing in a BalanchineProgram note, Performing Arts: Los Angeles Festival, September 3-27, 1987. 297 298 Poslmodern Dance dominated repertory. But, feeling rebellious toward even that brand of abstract ballet, she came to New York, where from 1976 to 1981 she was the marvel ofthe Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with her poise, speed, and pliable, seemingly infinite extension. Certainly in Cunningham's company she had already become part of a world where innovations in dance, art, and music intermarried. By the time she left Cunningham, Armitage had already been experimenting with her own choreography for several years. The titles ofsome of the early works, such as Ne (1978), hint at both her humor and her spirit. Vertige (1980), a duet for herself and new wave musician Rhys Chatham, first performed in a downtown Manhattan club, asserted a bracing frenzy. Drastic Classicism (1981), in which her company performed movements from the ballet canon with raw energy, literally in concert with a live punk rock band, articulated a logical direction - given her ballet background, her years with Cunningham, and her proclivity for new wave music. Writing in the NewYorker ofthe way Armitage "flayed [ballet] alive," Arlene Croce concluded that Drastic Classicism "transcended its own wildness to become a vindication of formal values in dancing." Though her tastes in music have shifted and the visual element has grown in importance, that direction, a radical classicism, remains constant. In The Watteau Duets (1984), Armitage again deconstructed ballet as she and Joseph Lennon, another ex-Cunningham dancer, explored partnering techniques clad in a variety of costumes, including spike heels for her (that functioned much like the pointe shoes she wore later), a leather skirt for him, and, for both, huge block-stilts. Not only the erotic and sadistic elements of the classical pas de deux, but also its cumbersome spectacle was apparent in this piece, which was performed to a blast of sound from David Linton's band that, like the dance, was both exquisite and tortuous. Critics dubbed Armitage the "punk ballerina." But while she has used its music and shares with punk a gift for assaulting the senses and a nostalgia for fifties style, Armitage's scheme is more consciously interwoven with artworld and danceworld achievements. "What I want to do is make ballets for this time," she has stated. "The work does not have a pioneering spirit. It is tied to the four hundred years ofsteps and technique and style that have evolved in ballet, and it is trying to take that somewhere else." Armitage's compositional style resembles that ofher collaborator, the painter David Salle, with whom she lives. Salle has designed the decors and costumes for a number ofher works, including The Elizabethan Phrasing...

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