Armitage Gone Gaga at the Joyce
April 28, 2011
Karole Armitage, who famously infused ballet with punk in the '80s, and returned to the US as Armitage Gone!, is now charging Eastern classicism with renegade aesthetic. She's trampling boundaries, as she has done for the past thirty years. She's now taking elements of Eastern traditional forms, for example the articulated hands, and applying her ideosyncratic language. GAGA-Gaku opened the Armitage Gone! Joyce season April 26, 2011. The premiere is a statement and a collaboration with Dance Theatre of Harlem where Armitage held a residence and borrowed three fine DTH dancers. They fit seamlessly with the eleven in her small company and with her vision.
The movement and Lois V Vierk’s musical compositions, Go Guitars and Red Shift, are quasi-Eastern. Vierk studied gagaku (Japanese court music)for twelve years. In keeping with Armitage’s interest in science and working with high profile artist collaborators and issues, Issey Mayake based the costumes, boxy black tops for the women and shorts for the men, on mathematical algorithms and made them from recycled fibers.
In gorgeous duets, Armitage mirrors different body types, the tallest with the shortest or black with white-skinned. It looks both ingenious and inevitable and disproves the outdated 'birds-of-a-feather' axiom. the dancers arms curve; their torsos undulate. It has elements of ritual with stomping, fierce, stretched poses and voguing. In perhaps the most fascinating passage, the large, black Marlon Taylor-Wiles tugs the whole group stage-right with mime, like a latter-day Olympian lord.
Story and drama are featured in GAGA-Gaku, as they are in the Eastern dances that served as inspiration. But the stories can't be mistaken for actual time-tested and refined Eastern legends, nor can the dancers' hand positions be confused with the language that classical dancers take decades to learn and perfect.The energetic tableaux in GAGA-Gaku defy the classical forms' spirituality too. For other reasons —like Armitage's sculpting of the exquisite tuned, toned, different dancers'—this reverential, theatrical choreography has us anticipating more.
The main character, dancer Megumi Eda, recalls Edward Scissorhands. She is a powerful action figure who dances an empowering tale. And her long, knife-like finger extensions don't graze the skin of her partner and fellow company dancers. The splayed blades emanate gold rays in Clifton Taylor’s understated lighting. The others shadow her hand dances.
The musician Matthew Mottel is a foil as the character Mushroom. He emerges from a red curtain that extends across the width and forms a foreshortened performing area. Standing like a pirate alongside the dancers, who are in a close-packed, central, vertical line, he shouts about zombies from Albuquerque. This alien dance-play is for a few moments, smack in the middle of the riveting musical sense of GAGA-Gaku. Mushroom's puzzling outburst only looks like a breach of dance decorum.
Ligeti Essays has never looked so gem-like. Especially notable is the dancers’ musicality to György Ligeti song cycles. The tone is soft and serious, with one playful, humorous scene. Essays lacks Armitage’s political frontage. Thus, it is pure poetry and emotion. For example, when Mei-Hua Wang raises her arms to shoulder height and appears to levitate; she’s backed against Taylor-Wiles in an upstage corner. David Salle’s cold metal tree is the décor in Clifton Taylor's heavenly wash of light.
Finally, Drastic Classicism from 1981 proves Armitage’s vision is long-held. Having missed the usher’s offer of earplugs, I held a finger to one still-functional ear. The jazzy movers later suggest a company ballet adagio class that breaks out into free, wild style, individual shines, and Leonides Arpon and Taylor-Wiles’s standout duet. We applaud, forgiving the live, ear-shattering Rhys Chatham rock.
