Global influence on dance

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to American choreographer Karole Armitage about her world tour of new dance pieces that use classical and contemporary music from Hungary to Burkina Faso and the U.S.
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Armitage Gone! Dance’s US tour

Concord Academy performances

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LISA MULLINS: Dance and music are key ingredients in the life of another American, choreographer Karole Armitage. She is well known in Europe too, having spent a lot of her life and career there. Armitage takes her choreography in unexpected directions. Cason point, her signature punk ballets. Her group, Armitage Gone Dance is now beginning a tour of the United States and Europe. Karole Armitage came to our studios to talk about her work, and the kind of music that she’s is attracted to. And that includes the work of late Hungarian composer Gyorg Ligeti. Karole Armitage used his music to create a dance called Ligeti Essays.

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KAROLE ARMITAGE: What Ligeti did in this music, was he took a lot of folk traditions from Hungary, and he combined them with influences from Asia. And this made this very peculiar world of sound and feeling, that is very subtle and dreamy. And in this particular case, the dancers are carrying lanterns. You know, it’s kind of like moonlit, and it’s just about the beautiful feeling of nature and culture coming together.

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LISA MULLINS: So when we take music like this, how do you match it with movement?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Well, Juxtaposition position is a huge thing that I’m interested in. Collision, Juxtaposition position, accidents.

LISA MULLINS: This is the punk ballet choreographer?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: That’s right. It’s the punk side. You know, I like extremes, and I like things that are extremely sensuous and romantic, and I like things that are really tough. And so, that’s what makes it interesting because you’re talking about the complexity of being human this way.

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KAROLE ARMITAGE: So the dance has its own independent line, but at the same time, it is closely, intimately connected to the music. Because if it’s literal, it’s very dull and boring.

LISA MULLINS: Literal meaning what?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Literal if you’re like falling pam-pam-pam-pam, like Beethoven. You’re moving your arms, pam-pam-pam-punch, for example. That is boring, but when you do something that is interweaving with it, so there’re two things connecting. Then it becomes this very sensual, very interesting dialogue between the two.

LISA MULLINS: Now interestingly, you also worked with Gyorg Ligeti’s son. This is a man, in fact, that we have had on the show before, his name is Lucas Ligeti. Tell us about your collaboration with him and how you first discovered him.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Well, I had worked with the father’s music, and he was very, very influenced by African polyrhythms and the thought in African music, which was quite unusual. And his son has sort of taken that another step further. Lucas has spent a great deal of time in Africa, and he actually formed a band that’s called Burkina Electric, he’s one of the co-founders.

LISA MULLINS: From Burkina Faso?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: They’re from Burkina Faso, and they use traditional Burkina Bay music, and they combine it with western techno and electronics.

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KAROLE ARMITAGE: So, I was asked by a Sicilian Prince to make a new piece for an outdoor Greek theater.

LISA MULLINS: Oh, him again.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Yes, him again, exactly. This wonderful man, and he’s run many opera houses in Italy. And he asked me to do a piece based on Dionysus, he wanted something mythic. And I though, you know, there’s something about the way that Burkina Electric sound has, that deep visceral connection to the earth, at the same time that it’s extremely modern and has this technology. And what better way to think about Dionysus, and ritual, and myth, than using something from Africa and combining it with my, sort of, virtuoso ballet.

LISA MULLINS: Can you give us the image?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Well, for example, the lead singer, Mai, [PH] who’s quite extraordinary. She’s as much a dancer as she is a singer, and she is singing in the center doing a traditional African dance. And with her are two men, and one woman, doing the traditional, and surrounding her in complicated almost pulsing geometry are 10 other dancers going in and out doing this kind of wild ballet. So you see these two worlds coming together with the same rhythm, and some how the same accent. So that even though it’s dense and complex, there’s like order within the disorder.

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LISA MULLINS: Do you find that the interpretation on the part of the dancer is different, depending on where they’re from?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Yes. And this is an interesting thing, and this is part o the reason I like having people from all different parts of the world. I have two Japanese dancers, and there’s doubt that they are particularly good at making movement that is full of curves, because their writing is full of curves. And I think the whole asymmetrical sensibility of Japanese art is very natural to them, and it’s almost got kind of curves and a feeling of nature. And of course, nature is never straight lines. And in nature is much more important in their tradition, than it is in ours. And all of this comes out in how they dance.

LISA MULLINS: I wanna send talking about Watteau duets. Tell us what Watteau duets is all about, and where the name came from.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: Watteau duets is a long, long duet in six section, where a couple does these six different duets, and it is kind of the story of a relationship. The reason it’s called the Watteau duets is because the great painter, Antoine Watteau from France, painted all these scenes of romance, courtship, in the Baroque era. And it’s, much of it is about the delightful side, but then there’s this kind of sly feeling always that this is sort of only the surface.

LISA MULLINS: And the music spans styles and time.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: The music is by composer David Linton. He was a drummer, he had never composed before, but he took, kind of, the whole history of western music and condensed it into these short little seven minute sections. And it starts with kind of Elizabethan sounds, then the next one goes to Baroque, and it goes to Romantic, it goes to Stravinsky, and then into, kind of, Henry Cowell and John Cage influence. So you have this whole encyclopedia of the history of music, which accompanies the history of this couple.

LISA MULLINS: And the band is on stage?

KAROLE ARMITAGE: They are on stage and they are fun. [LAUGHS]

LISA MULLINS: Excellent. Karole, thank you very much.

KAROLE ARMITAGE: My pleasure.

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LISA MULLINS: Music from the Watteau Duets, which is gonna be presented tonight at summer stage’s dance, at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. There’s more information on the Armitage Gone Dance tour, at theworld.org

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