Cubism and metaphor feed ’08 avant ballets

By Lori Ortiz

Karole Armitage, branded the punk ballerina in the ’80s, embarked on a series of vibrant music visualizations in her annual seasons since returning from Europe four years ago to base her company Armitage Gone! Dance in New York. Now realized as “The Dream Trilogy,” it began with “Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood,” to Béla Bartók. The response was very welcoming. Joan Acocella said in the New Yorker, “She should come home, and stay.” She included this among Armitage works that push ballet “into new realms of tone and meaning.”

“Ligeti Essays,” came next, to Gyorgy Ligeti’s music. Armitage, in a phone interview before her upcoming season at the Joyce, described it as “portraits of the human psyche.” Each successive dance in the series reflects a highly developed investigation of metaphor in movement.

The new “Connoisseurs of Chaos” is to “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” composed by Morton Feldman. Armitage described how in this third part of the trilogy, the movement communicates “the roiling wild energy of the universe [in the music], and then the very intimate, introspective soft meditative parts. That’s a place for the dance to come forward.”

The “Connoisseurs” set is a projection by longtime collaborator and painter David Salle. The images create “a magical country house atmosphere,” said Armitage. “The set shows a dream happening.”

“Feldman felt his way through the composition, never creating by formula or theory, even though it’s highly structured,” marveled Armitage. Her dance aims for that same look of spontaneity, in non-uniform movements for her small cast of six dancers — a sense of “order within disorder.”

“There’s certain passages you could call abstract — for the thrill, beauty, and excitement — but that’s leading to the way individuals emerge from that and have relationships. I hope people will identify. It’s meant to be personal and human.” The movements “allow you to see human behavior,” she explained.

Some phrases will be seen from different angles, like “cubism in motion.” “Like a flock of birds, [the dancers on stage] are united in purpose but not necessarily doing the same thing.”

Cellist Felix Fan and pianist Andrew Russo will perform live. The dancers include Megumi Eda, who took a brief breather to give birth, and Frances Chiaverini, who replaced Eda and stayed on. New Yorkers recently saw this strong and articulate dancer in Luca Veggetti’s “Four Voices.” Leonides D. Apron, Matthew Branham, William Isaac, and Mei-Hua Wang complete the cast.

Stijn Celis, a visiting Belgian choreographer, is making his U.S. debut with a work for Cedar Lake Ballet. His “Rite” to Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” was created in ’05 for Nederlands Dans Theater II, during his tenure as Artistic Director there. Nine dance forceful and primitive crouching movements in a set of his design. Three cubic bars covered with green flocking, one 26’ long, are the moveable stage furniture. The minimal means somehow evoke a lush primeval environment.

In a nod to cubism, Celis doubles characters. The original ballet “Le Sacre du Printemps” premiered around the time that cubist works by Leger and Picasso were created. Two groups collectively embody male and female characters, as they do in past “Rites” by countless other choreographers. Several dance “The Chosen One,” each exhibiting facets by dancing the role from different perspectives. “It’s somehow a multiplication of one person. It’s fractal, divided,” Celis said in a recent interview at Cedar Lake.

“It’s not an exterior work,” he said. “It’s more giving a certain type of energy. I set out to have a narrative that works more like a grid rather than a pathway so it is a grid of things you’ll see in space and compose. That makes for something concrete which is ones own personal sacrifice whatever that might mean, within a cycle.”

Also on the Cedar Lake program is a world premiere by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, “Ten Duets on the Theme of Rescue.” Each one-minute duet is a fast-moving dance with rich physicality. They happen in a ring of lights. Pite is telling the story inherent in choreographed movement. She is interested in body language and “what the body has to say about need, defeat, courage, despair, desire, joy, ambivalence, frustration, love.” True to Pite’s no-frills form, the dancers wear “real people clothes.”

“The work isn’t portraying a particular rescue, but more the idea of rescue in different forms; physical, emotional. “The word ‘rescue’ conjures a story efficiently and beautifully: I am trying to find the same efficiency and beauty in choreographic images.” Pite chose the music from the 2002 sci-fi film “ Solaris” for its otherworldly quality. “It has space — it has room for movement,” said the choreographer in an email from her Vancouver home over the holidays.

Pite’s award winning dances have had an element of subtle humor and an architectural sense of moving bodies within unyielding, inanimate structures. She performed and created as a member of William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. Her vocabulary is rooted in his improvisational method. She now has her own company “Kidd Pivot.”

A reprisal of Italian choreographer Jacopo Godani’s “Symptoms of Development” completes the Cedar Lake Program. Enter the influence of Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato. Also very physical, this dance is full of ominous portent and could be read as a rescue from anomy and an appeal for humanity. The sound includes spoken instructions in hand-held microphones.