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Taming the gypsy in her soul: still a rebel, Karole Armitage pushes the boundaries of classicism as she builds her company in NYC.

Article Excerpt
Growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, Karole Armitage traveled great distances to take ballet. Her mother drove miles to get her to class with Tomi Worthan, who'd danced with the New York City Ballet. In the summer, when her biologist father headed for the Colorado wilderness to pursue his research, she hiked over a mountain pass to Aspen, where she studied at the school of Ballet West.

Trained at the School of American Ballet and the North Carolina School of the Arts, she had a dance career that veered from the neoclassicism of Balanchine at the Geneva Ballet to years in the postmodern cathedral of Merce Cunningham. Beginning to choreograph in 1978, she made headlines with her "haut punk" Drastic-Classicism in 1981, but later proved she could handle classics like Swan Lake, mounting them in the great opera houses of Europe. She's worked in every imaginable environment, returning to New York's Joyce Theater two years ago with her company Armitage Gone! Dance in Time is the echo of an axe within a wood, a kind of dance Esperanto. It included snippets of extreme choreographic styles from yoga and bharata natyam to voguing.

Last winter, at the 200-seat Duke Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan, her In this dream that dogs me took critics and audiences by storm. Sleek and streamlined, it featured her...

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