An Armitage Sampler

Karole Armitage is used to a nomadic life. She’s spent much of the past two decades bumping around Europe directing ballets and operas. But in 2005, she decided to set down roots in New York with a new company, Armitage Gone! One of the major projects of that company is “The Dream Trilogy,” the final segment of which premiered in New York in January.
Armitage brought a very pared down version of that trilogy to Alverno College’s Pitman Theatre Saturday night—or it might even be called a sampler. The six dancers performed the first (of three) section of “Ligeti Essays” (2007) without its frozen landscape set by David Salle. And they followed it with a shortened version of “Time is an echo of an ax within a wood” (2004).
So rather than an extended exploration of a particular themes or ideas, we got two short, contrasting works that said a lot about what Armitage is up to with her new company. The “Ligeti Essays,” set to short songs by the much loved Hungarian composer György Ligeti who died in 2007, lost some of its visual resonance on the bare stage (you can see an excerpt of the original staging here). Set on David Salle’s ice-rink in purgatory, the tender duets evoked tenderness on the edge of oblivion, the dance equivalent of Schubert’s long, lonely walk in Die Winterreise. On the Pitman Theatre stage, you could feel the ice with each slide (the dancers wore socks, which allowed an assortment of skate-like moves), but you felt none of the chill.
Still, the movement was remarkable for its viscous fluidity. Though the mood of each of the 15 pieces vary wildly, this is a cozy armchair of a dance—soft, plush, perfectly captured by Peter Speliopoulos’s simple velvet costumes. The partnering is athletic but giving. When William Isaac gently pushes head of Mei-Hua Wang, their whole bodies pulsate like amoebas in a Petri dish. Even as Ligeti’s music shifts from elegiac to wacky, the style of the dance is loose and rubbery. And the sextet has the astonishing technique to render these ideas with amazing ease.
In “Time is an echo…” the mood is completely different. The look is taut and metallic (including Salle’s beaded curtain which ripples sensuously when the dancers step throuth it). The Bartok music (“Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) is gently propulsive, and the dance’s energy drives it as much as follows along. The style here is equally smooth and flexible, but it has more the feel of bodies at war with themselves. There’s a throughline of tension that isn’t as much resolved at the end of each sequence as held in check until the next phrase starts.
But through both pieces, you can see a brave new combination of Armitage’s influences: Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, her years of dabbling with more pop forms. It’s a dense, beautiful collection of ideas executed by astonishing dancers, even if they didn’t seem to capture the full picture of Armitage’s original vision.
"Ligeti Essays" photograph by Paul Kolnick; "Time is an echo..." photograph by Amitava Sarkar.