Karole Armitage and the universal grammar.

CHOREOGRAPHER Karole Armitage has a beautiful loft overlooking lower Manhattan, but she doesn't enjoy the view that often. Between January and May, she unveiled six new projects ranging from an opera in Naples to a New York season at The Joyce. This month she heads to Venice to direct the dance component of the Biennale.

The festival, which may be the last time dance is included in the Biennale, consists of six weeks of international programming. Choreographers range from established troupes like Rambert Dance Company to freelance choreographers like Italy's Jacopo Godani. Armitage divided the summer into two sections: Old World and New World, which include choreographers from Europe and Asia between June 11-30, and the United States and Cuba from July 9-31. Performances take place at Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, Teatro alle Tese, Palafenice, and Teatro Fondamenta Nuove.

What drew this in-demand choreographer to direct a festival? "First of all, I love working in Italy. I have a history there and have worked there regularly," she says, looking much younger than her 49 years. "I was director of the Florence Ballet for four years, ending in 1999. Since then I have spent quite a bit of time doing productions in Italy. It's a second home. The Italians are the inventors of the Renaissance, and they're an incredibly sophisticated audience."

Armitage also took full advantage of the Biennale's mission to do things that are new and radical. She invited artists she considers "really intelligent and deep-thinking. It's absolutely not about what gets good press, or what's in with the 'in' crowd, or what the politics are. It's about severe intellectual ideas and trying to make them come alive."

Although this is an appropriate job for Armitage, whose name became synonymous with "punk ballet" in the 1980s, it's nonetheless a challenging one. "Although the Biennale has a huge budget for art and movies, I can tell you that the dance budget is like $450,000 for everything: all travel, all hotels, and all fees. I think European companies are subsidized, so their lees can amount to transportation and hotels. They don't need us to pay the dancers' salaries. That's really how it's possible."

On that tight budget, she was able to cull choreographers Shen Wei, Russell Maliphant, John Jasperse, Sarah Michelson, and Amanda Miller (for her last time as artistic director of Ballett Freiburg), and Ballet de Lorraine, as well as Peter Boal's newly-formed chamber troupe and others.

As different as these artists are, Armitage says the dance festival's theme is "the universal grammar of the body. It's about how the body itself creates language and metaphor, which create meaning. It's about dance in its deepest sense, not about theatrical dance or athletics, but really the poetic quality of dance."

She says the director of each sector of the Biennale--music, visual arts, dance--creates his or her own theme. "They're not interlinked and they each have their own season. In fact, dance is in June and July specifically because I wasn't available until then!"