Karole Armitage

Quick Facts

Full Name	Karole Armitage
Occupation	Choreographer
Date Of Birth	Mar 3, 1954(1954-03-03)
Age	70
Birthplace	Madison
Country	United States
Birth City	Wisconsin
Horoscope	Pisces

Karole Armitage Biography

Karole Armitage is one of the most popular and richest Choreographer who was born on March 3, 1954 in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. She draws inspiration from a variety of non-narrative and non-narrative resources, from physics in the 20th century up to 16th century Florentine fashion as well as pop culture and contemporary media. In her hands, the classical vocabulary is given a surprise to its structure, with a flurry of speed and fractured lines, abstractions and symmetry resisted by an asymmetry. Music is her language and she has worked with composers of the contemporary and experimentalist tradition like John Luther Adams, Thomas Ades, Rhys Chatham, Vijay Iyer, and Lukas Ligeti. The scores are often marked by extreme lyricism aswell with dissonance, noise, and polyrhythms. The sets and costumes of her work are often created by the top artists from the art world of today which include Karen Kilimnik, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, David Salle, Phillip Taaffe and Brice Marden. She has also worked alongside fashion-forward creators Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Peter Speliopoulos with whom she has made a number of pieces. The director of films James Ivory created sets and costumes for a night of her choreography which was staged in Italy’s historical Teatro della Pergola, built in 1656.

The year was 1978 when she made her first work Ne which was followed by the iconic Drastic-Classicism piece in 1981. In into the 1980s Armitage ran her own company, which was located at New York City. Her company was internationally toured and was renowned as a collaborator with artist David Salle and Jeff Koons. She was commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov , to design an opera to be performed by the American Ballet Theatre. A few years later, Rudolph Nureyev commissioned one of her pieces to be performed by the Paris Opera Ballet. She composed 5 ballets to be performed by the Ballet de l’Opera National de Paris in the 1980s, that led to commissions in US as well as Europe that she pursued through the 1990s.

In 1982, Armitage was inspired to examine her roots as a classical ballet dancer after creating three new works for the Paris Opera Ballet at the invitation of Rosella Hightower and Rudolph Nureyev. She combined Balanchine’s poetic refinement and brilliant phrase making with Cunningham’s use of stage space as a field of action. Her controversial recipe combining the warring factions of ballet and modern dance injected with hard rock energy and the taboo of sexual content, gave dance a much needed shock to its systems with speed, fractured lines, off-balance movement, abstractions and symmetry countermanded by asymmetry and punch.

In 1984 Armitage met painter, David Salle, at a post performance dinner that included the choreographer, Yvonne Rainer. The meeting led to the second period in Armitage’s aesthetic development as Armitage and Salle began a collaboration that continues to this day. Salle’s work, combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language, brought dazzlingly original sets and costumes to the stage. The early Armitage/Salle collaborations were made in a free-spirited exploration of style, eras, pluralities and comparatives, embracing the contamination of languages in a mosaic of pattern. The divisions between ballet and modern, high and low, serious and banal disappeared through collage, juxtaposition and humor. Armitage and her dancers performed to spoken text, classical and popular music, jazz, world music and silence. Exploring American identity from the perspective of a culture using everything to sell products, Armitage and Salle’s stage work created a contemplative universe awash in color. Though Armitage found consumer culture’s influence on the creation of self disturbing, her collaboration with Salle was done, not in the spirit of the social critique, but in the spirit of the artist struggling for form, for the new, for the experimental.

Christian Marclay, while a student at Mass College of Art, designed costumes, set as well as posters to accompany Armitage’s initial work Ne in 1978. The next pieces by her were created by filmmaker Charles Atlas. Painter David Salle became her primary collaborator in 1984. Salle developed films and costumes, backdrops, flats, sculptures, and props for various versions of the NY-based Armitage dance troupes and also for European opera and ballet productions. Carroll Dunham created a backdrop for Les Stances and a Sophie in 1988. Jeff Koons worked with Armitage between 1987 and 1997 on stage productions across the US and around the world, creating costumes and sets together with David Salle. Philip Taaffe collaborated on Scheherzade in 1995 as well as on Itutu in 2008. Brice Marden created the backdrops to The Italian stage production Orfeo ed Eurdice in 2004 at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. for Ariadne Unhinged in 2008, Vera Lutter created the set and Donald Baechler designed props. Karen Kilimnik created painted panels that were based on Domenico Tepolo’s Il Designi Di Pulcinella for Made in Naples in 2009. The Armitage collaborators are composers, fashion designers, architects and lighting designers, as well as scientists. Director of film, James Ivory created sets and costumes for Armitage in Florence, Italy, as did Jean Paul Gaultier and Christina Lacroix. Peter Speliopoulos, Creative Director of Donna Karan collaborated extensively to make costumes and sets for Armitage productions in the mid 1990s onwards and continues to collaborate with the company to this day.

Karole Armitage Net Worth

Karole Armitage is one of the richest Choreographer from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Karole Armitage 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Karole Armitage (born March 3 1954) is an American choreographer and dancer who is currently living at New York City. She is the artistic director of Armitage Gone! Dance, a modern dance troupe that performs multiple times a year throughout the year in New York City as well as performing across the world. The company was called”the “punk ballerina” in the 1980s. She received an Tony nomination for choreography in her role in the Broadway show Hair.

Armitage started her career journey in 1973 when she joined the company of Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve in Switzerland. The company, helmed by George Balanchine and Patricia Neary was founded on the Balanchine aesthetic , and was devoted solely to his repertoire. She performed many Balanchine masterpieces, including Agon, The Four Temperaments and Serenade. In 1975 she was an Swiss citizen, and has double citizenship in the US. Between 1976 and 1981 she was part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing important roles throughout the world.

Armitage joins a long lineage of artists looking at the past at the same time as they seek to dismantle it. Her early work fused Merce Cunningham’s aesthetics with an ebullient, joyous, punk-inspired jubilation in destroying the old to bring in the new. The work not only challenged formal notions of dance, but its imagery and content heralded the rise of themes relating to sexuality and gender that became so important in late 20thand early 21st Century discourse. She changed the idea of the ballerina, portraying her as independent thinker with an erotic appetite, rather than as an unobtainable, romantic ideal. In 1980 she put a man in a skirt on the stage as a matter of fact, rather than as drag.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Karole Armitage Dating?

According to our records, Karole Armitage is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Karole Armitage’s is not dating anyone.

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She was named resident choreographer of the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, in 1999, where she was to remain until 2002 creating over 20 works for the company that toured throughout Europe.

Facts & Trivia

Karole Ranked on the list of most popular Choreographer. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Karole Armitage celebrates birthday on March 3 of every year.

Upon her return to New York in 2004, Armitage relaunched Armitage Gone! Dance in a period of intense creativity. To complement her work with visual artists, Armitage began an ongoing collaboration with scientists, drawing upon conceptual ideas around time, space and geometry. In this new phase, Armitage created movement that looks spontaneous and personal, despite it is rigorous craftsmanship. Here dance, light, music, and design are unified into a balanced whole. Concepts such as “cubism in motion” are applied to group patterns creating several vantage points so that movement is seen from multiple perspectives, angles and levels with planes bleeding into each other. The steps themselves are based on calligraphy and fractal geometry (the geometry of nature: clouds, mountains, seashores) creating a sinuous, curvilinear vocabulary unlike the Euclidean geometry of the dance tradition. In her work, the dancers share a common purpose but do not dance in unison. Her spatial design is both elaborate and cohesive, producing a funky, democratic individuality. Extreme lyricism is punctuated by raw, violent accents.