The melding of fashion with the arts is a common enough relationship, as one often feeds the other – life imitating art, art imitating life – but, the conscious marriage of art with science is a unique pairing, one guaranteed to be found if Karole Armitage is involved.
“I find much inspiration in my love of nature,” said dance choreographer Karole Armitage. “I draw a lot of technical ideas from nature to create movement such as using fractal geometry – the geometry of nature, clouds, mountains – rather than Euclidian geometry. This makes a curvilinear, sinuous movement vocabulary as opposed to one of straight lines.” Artmitage has as much of a mind for science as she does an aptitude for dance. Raised by a scientist for a father, she can hold her own in a conversation over climate change better than you can attempt to dance the Rose Adagio in pointe. “I almost never use exact unison on stage. Who has ever seen birds flapping their wings at exactly the same time? Instead they are travelling together and sharing the experience, which has allowed me to think about how dancers and singers can move together in a different way.”
In addition to incorporating science within the body of her work, Armitage has the reputation for performing at less conventional venues, such as in March, when her dance company, Armitage Gone! performed “On the Nature of Things” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, under the suspended replica of a Blue Whale in Milstein Hall, her troupe premiered a choreographed piece based off Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s writings on climate change.
Armitage is poised to do the same, with plans to perform “Dido and Aeneas” outdoors for Opera Saratoga next month. It will be the premier of the company’s first Baroque opera when it opens on Monday, July 6, in front of the National Museum of Dance.
Armitage, a recipient of France’s prestigious Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, often “paints” with contemporary styles of dance, music and art to engage in the philosophical.
“All choreography for me involves two things: one is empathetic and one is analytical,” said Armitage. If that’s not left-brained enough for you, she signs each of her e-mails with a quote from Voltaire, “Men argue; Nature acts.” Yes, Voltaire was a writer, and therefore right-brained, but is known, too, for his own broad range of interests that included religion, politics and science. “The movement reflects the state of mind of the production where empathy comes in. This, in turn, is translated into a movement vocabulary that changes from piece to piece while still partaking of the basic principles that have become my signature. Just as a writer or painter addresses different subjects, you recognize a particular person’s point of view in their work. Dance is the same – it is writing, or painting, on the air.”
“Dido and Aeneas” was written by 17th-century English composer, Henry Purcell, a tragedy depicting the love between the opera’s namesakes — Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, the Trojan hero, originally depicted by Virgil in “Aeneid.”
Mezzo Soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano is to play the role of Dido. Cano is a 2012 Richard Tucker Career Grant and George London Winner and joined The Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at The Metropolitan Opera in 2008. She ultimately made her Met debut in its 2009-2010 season. As winner of the 2009 Young Concert Artist International Auditions, she has given recital debuts in New York’s Carnegie Hall, in Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center, in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center.
Competing with three-hundred years’ worth of various interpretations, Armitage said she looks forward to addressing the “universal topic” of love, complete with the vulnerability, fears and joys associated with it. “I hope to have enough rehearsal time to make all of their movement correspond beautifully to the music while using an understated, stylized, pedestrian form of gesture; a form of gestures that is not at all naturalistic in the way an actor would be expressive, but one that is more ritualistic and stylized so as to feel as both ancient and modern.”
Assisting Armitage with achieving this feel is none other than Peter Speliopoulos, creative director of Donna Karan New York. A 30-year veteran of design, Speliopoulos is known as Karan’s No. 2 in one of the largest fashion houses in the United States. However, “Dido” will be just one of several productions in which he has paired with Armitage since the two worked together in Greece in the summer of 2000, when he designed costumes for the Athens Opera production of “The Birds” by Aristophanes.
“Karole is certainly one of the most uniquely talented and brilliant of talents,” said Speliopoulos. “She is an intellectual and yet a very sensitive individual who is interested in the psychology of things, and understands the forces of nature. … Karole searches deep for the meaning of everything, and on such a broad level. Needless to say, I have learned a tremendous amount, which has informed my life and work as a designer.”
Speliopoulos describes his nearly 20-year long friendship with Armitage as “gratifying” as they both share interests in art, music, history and literature.
“This makes working together very natural, always for me, incredibly stimulating,” he said.
Speliopoulos’ eye for aesthetics helps meld the two worlds of fashion and dance together. “The fabric: how it moves on the body, color, how it reflects emotion, proportions that are flattering and appropriate,” are the common threads between what consumers buy from the fashion label and what performers wear on stage. But, as he prepares to design, that’s where the commonality ends. “How things appear on stage is different from what makes them modern as fashion, in terms say, of make, how they are finished. … Costumes require a real focus on dramatic impact. Dance requires, for me, that the body looks great, that even with the violence of extreme movement, the dancer is confident in the costume. Ultimately, we all seek looking great.”
The music for “Dido” is in the hands of Artistic Director and Conductor Nicole Paiement of Opera Parallèle in San Francisco. In recent years she has conducted the works of Lou Harrison’s “Young Caesar,” and the commissioned chamber version of John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby.” Paiement studied Baroque music while pursuing a doctorate degree at the Eastman School of music.
Tying together the contemporary with an opera three centuries old all comes back to the choreographer named the “punk ballerina,” for her Billy Idol like hair-do and love for the anti-establishment music.
“An artist’s job is to express their times in an original way,” said Armitage. “The complexity of human experience means having curiosity about many things and bringing them to the stage. The audience enjoys recognizing the world they live in and participating in [and] thinking about it through their own experience. Art with ambiguity and complexity seems to me to be the best kind of entertainment. Being told what to think and feel seems very dull. An artist’s job is not to recreate the past and imitate past eras. It is to feel and translate their times into a very concise experience thus offering the audience a chance to feel by using their own experience, intelligence, empathy and sensibility.
That means theoretical physics; punk and the classics are all a part of the picture.”
