The Brooklyn Rail

KAROLE ARMITAGE, artistic director of Armitage Gone! Dance, is renowned for pushing the boundaries to create contemporary works that blend dance, music, science, and art to engage in philosophical questions about the search for meaning. She directed MaggioDanza di Firenze al Teatro Comunale (1995-99) and the Biennale of Contemporary Dance in Venice (2004), and served as resident choreographer for the Ballet de Lorraine in France (1999-2004). She has created works for many companies from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, the Ballet de L’Opéra de Paris, to the Tasmanian Dance Company in Australia; directed opera at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples,Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Het National Opera in Amsterdam; and choreographed two productions for the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. Armitage’s work is at once both esoteric and popular. She choreographed Broadway Productions (Passing Strange and Hair, the latter earning her a Tony Nomination), videos for Madonna and Michael Jackson, several films for Merchant Ivory productions, and Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna (2012). She was honored with a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and a Simons Fellow at the University of Kansas in 2016 to study Native American Plains Culture and is currently an MIT Media Lab Directors Fellow. Her next company production, Halloween Unleashed, takes place at La MaMa from October 27–29, 2017.