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Who

Armitage is a wildly experimental choreographer whose work fuses ballet and modern dance.

Backstory

Armitage grew up in Kansas and the Colorado wilderness (her father was a wildlife biologist) and she clearly developed a vivid imagination as a child—she claims to have hiked over a 12,000-foot mountain pass to Aspen to study ballet. By age 13, she'd settled in New York, where she studied with the American Ballet Theater. She gained widespread fame as a performer in the 1970s and 1980s dancing for Merce Cunningham, and choreographed her first piece in 1979. That was the same year she launched a dance company of her own, Armitage Gone!, but she remained with Cunningham until 1991, when—frustrated by her lack of commercial success—the enfant terrible of ballet decamped to Europe. She spent nearly 15 years living in Amsterdam before returning to NYC in 2005.

Of note

Armitage is known for her odd, experimental style. Her 1988 production of Go-Go Ballerina, which featured sets designed Jeff Koons, involved her biting a man and him hauling her around by her thighs. ("Just awful," concluded one critic.) Another performance from the 1980s revolved around junk bond king Michael Milken and featured men in business suits yelling "Buy! Sell!" while dancing. And she named one of her productions -p = dH/dq, although she was later convinced to change the title to The Watteau Duets. Despite her critics—"Little talent, much pretension," the Times' Anna Kisselgoff once wrote—she does have her fans. Her novel approach to dance, and her resolutely feminist attitude, have delighted dance enthusiasts tired of the status quo. And she managed to score critical praise with her most recent work, "Time is the echo of an axe within a wood," which debuted at the Joyce Theater in March 2007. The Times described it as "one of the most beautiful dances to be seen in New York in a very long time."

Personal

The unmarried Armitage lives on North Moore Street.