Choreographer adds movement to ‘Twilight Epiphany’ skyspace
Choreographer Karole Armitage has made dances with music so loud the audience needs earplugs, dances built around conjoined wigs and dances that use bodies to trigger sounds. Until now, however, she has not made a dance that wasn’t propelled by legs.
Armitage laughed as she realized this one recent afternoon.
We were sitting in the balcony of James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” skyspace at Rice University, where six members of the New York-based Armitage Gone! Dance Company and 20 guest dancers from Houston will perform April 22-23. The audience will be on the bottom level, a vantage point that limits their view of bodies along the balcony’s concrete edge holding the banks of light that color the structure’s rooftop oculus at sunrise and sunset.
Readers of a certain age may recall the still-gamine Armitage as the famous “punk ballerina” of the 1980s, a nickname coined by Vanity Fair a few years after she founded her company. With a rare legacy as both a George Balanchine ballerina and a minimalist-modern Merce Cunningham dancer, Armitage forged a daring early signature all her own with works that were thrashing and dangerous-looking.
At 68, she is not so easy to label. On the day we met, her disposition was sunny and unpretentious. Maybe there was a whiff of Texan in it, even; her mother is from a sixth-generation
East Texas farm and ranch family.
Wallpaper Magazine describes Armitage’s résumé as “kaleidoscopic.” Armitage calls it “kind of eccentric.” She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists ( Jeff Koons among them), scientists and fashion designers (most recently Marc Jacobs). She has choreographed major music videos (including Madonna’s “Vogue” and Michael Jackson’s “In the Closet”), operas, Broadway musicals (“Passing Strange” and “Hair”), Cirque du Soleil’s “Amaluna” and dozens of contemporary ballets for the world’s best companies, as well as her own. She has directed international festivals and an Italian ballet company. She’s been a fellow at the MIT Media Lab. She also recently stepped back onto the stage herself, for the first time since 1989, in a duet she created during the pandemic with an old pal, New York City Ballet legend Jock Soto.
She has explored climate change, ancient Japanese theater, medieval philosophy, new media capabilities and classic Italian films in recent years. But, of course, those dances all rely on legs. This makes the Rice project altogether new.
“Discovery is the most exciting thing,” Armitage said. “It is still always
(most) important to me to develop new ways of moving and thinking about what the body can do. It can lead to a metaphor, but fundamentally, it has to happen through the body being interesting and being reconceived.” She likes science themes, she added, “because science makes you think about time and space in different ways, and therefore, you think differently about how to move.”
At Rice, she also wants to create an otherworldly visual feast. “It is honoring James Turrell, absolutely,” she said. “It is honoring being outside in a completely unique space at night. I want it to be about those elements: being in the breeze, seeing the night sky, seeing the bodies.”
When I remind her there will be uncontrollable sounds — possibly sirens and helicopters at the Texas Medical Center nearby, she nods and smiles. “That’s right, all of those Cageian (as in John Cage) things. Chance operations are always a part of it. It’s almost a cross between dance and performance art because the visual is going to be so dominant.”
She wants to encourage the audience to look in ways it has “never looked before,” she said. “You have never seen a dance from these angles. So it’s trying to make that completely new experience feel powerful, alive and interesting.”
The dancers will wear white, so their costumes reflect the changing color palette. Their movement is timed to an electronic score by the late Alvin Lucier. Like a sonic relative of Turrell’s art, Lucier’s sound blends technology, nature and spiritual dimensions. “It’s very much about the perception of sound,” Armitage said. “It’s experiential. It certainly isn’t telling you what to think or feel. It’s all about being in the moment.”
The audience might feel they are “looking up at a chorus of angels; but maybe they’re devils,” Armitage said. She also envisioned a level of detail that echoes close-up photography; with unison movements that suggest a theme and variations. Some sections will involve what she calls “dancey dance,” with virtuosic movement by her company; other sections are built with isolations, focusing on different parts of the dancers’ bodies.
Her company’s appearance also could be a bittersweet segue. Armitage still works 15 hours daily but feels like she needs a reset. “I’ve just done so much, and it’s been thrilling,” she said. “It’s so hard for me to say, but I think it’s time to say goodbye having a company.”
There’s no cultural support anymore for the old model of staging big New York seasons and touring, she explained. “What’s interesting is to have a career that is about the freedom of thinking and creating with a group of people. You push the body and ideas and philosophy as far as you can. You create a culture together. … I’m very proud of what we’ve been doing.”
Choreographers everywhere know this problem, and visual arts organizations have stepped up to give dance a fighting chance. (The benefits are mutual; live performances bring people to museums, too.)
During the five years since the Moody Center opened across the street from Turrell’s Houston skyspace, its director, Alison Weaver, has become one of Houston’s most reliable supporters of new dance. She often invites choreographers to create site-specific works that “activate” the Moody’s art exhibitions. “We are just constantly, with each project, thinking about movement,” she said. “These are invitations to artists to bring their own voice to a conversation.”
Turrell collaborated with Rice’s Shepherd School of Music to design the skyspace as a lab for experimental sound. Weaver has only staged dance there once before, to celebrate the Moody’s opening; and she regularly turns down requests by artists to perform
there. “The skyspace is not a venue. It’s a public artwork — a freestanding, immersive sculpture that also inspires other works of art, whether that be music or dance or light,” Weaver said. “It’s a generative space. That makes it unique in the land of public art, or at least the dynamic.”
She commissioned “Skyspace Performance: Karole Armitage” for a series celebrating the 10th anniversary of Turrell’s masterpiece because she knew Armitage would find an inventive way to converse with it. “It takes an artist like Karole to come at the challenge knowing it’s going to be a two-way street,” Weaver said.
No skyspace performances can interfere with Turrell’s contemplative, permanently programmed (and sacrosanct) sunset show. Armitage’s dance happens afterward and will have its own light sequence masterminded by professor Kurt Stallmann, Rice’s skyspace guru.
Weaver, too, brings up the “Cageian” element. “In the spirit of indeterminacy, of chance, you don’t know what you’re going to get,” she said. “We have choppers at the Medical Center, we have people going by with roller bags or on bikes. We have birds. It could be damp; it could be too cold. It’s exciting to see how different artists respond to that, but it does take a special artist.”
Armitage visited the skyspace with an open mind during a site visit last fall, coming up with the idea to put the dancers up top after Weaver leaned over the balcony to describe how the lights work.
Artists often respond well to severe limitations, “and these are about as severe as you can get,” Armitage said. “It’s a real challenge to make half an hour of dance compelling when there’s 15 inches of space to move in, and you can see from the hips up at the most. But that will lead to creativity, no question.”