Return of the PUNK Ballerina.

Karle Armitage no longer doles out earplugs or dons stiletto heels, But her dances still keep people on the edge of their seats

Twenty years ago next month, as audience members stuffed their ears with complimentary cotton balls to muffle the throb and wail of five punk rockers, Karole Armitage sliced across the floor of Manhattan's Dance Theater Workshop. Five other dancers crashed around nearby, but it was Armitage, with her volatile leaps and fractured arabesques, who caught viewers' eyes. Wrapping an arm around the guitarist Rhys Chatham, she sent one of her spidery legs to the heavens. Moments later she slammed into his guitar, releasing a howl of feedback.

The dance indelibly branded her a "punk ballerina" while its title, Drastic Classicism, became a metaphor for her way of joining seemingly contradictory elements. It wasn't long before Armitage, the unlikely protogee of both George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, began to land commissions from such disparate icons as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Madonna. Then she dropped out of sight.

After a decade spent mostly in Europe, Armitage will return to New York in late January for a short retrospective season at the Joyce Theater. The engagement is part of the theater's Altogether Different Festival, an annual showcase for artists whose work falls outside the mainstream.

Now 46, Armitage is drawn less to jarring collisions than to layered movement styles, quicksilver transitions and emotional complexities. One balmy afternoon last fall, she sat down in her lower Manhattan loft and explained her aversion to aesthetic orthodoxy, the idea that dancers should bow to certain fixed ideals.

"There is no such thing as pure," she said. "The tradition of ballet, and all forms of dance, has been to incorporate what's going on around it. The Russians clearly took folk dances and stylized them so they became part of the ballet vocabulary. And Balanchine put jazz movements into ballet."

Running her fingers through her spiky blond hair, she added: "We've got to have something that people recognize in their daily lives. Everything about life is more about cross-cultural influences, hybrid influences. That is to a great extent the history of art. The Renaissance, after all, was taking Greek ideas and updating them. That's really how art works."

That outlook helps account for her new position in Nancy, France, where she signed on last fall as resident choreographer at the newly chartered Ballet de Lorraine. The thirty-five-member company, formerly known as Ballet de Nancy, has been shifting its repertoire from classical ballet (Swan Lake, Giselle) to contemporary dance (Mathilde Monnier, Nacho Duato and soon John Neumeier).

For her retrospective in New York, Armitage rounded up eight of her favorite dancers from Italy, France, Russia and England. She also enlisted Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans, two principal dancers at New York City Ballet. They will perform Life Story (1999), a duet based on a Tennessee Williams poem and set to music by the young British composer and pianist Thomas Ades. The costumes are by the New York painter David Salle, whose artistic and personal partnership with Armitage has spanned much of the last fifteen years.

"It's a very wry and amusing depiction of a one-night stand," Armitage says. "These two people wake up in the morning and realize that they know nothing about each other and that they very likely have nothing in common. It's hilarious and at the same time kind of gut-wrenching."

The program opens on a more soulful note, with a seventeen-minute excerpt from I Had a Dream (1993), an homage Armitage created on the tenth anniversary of Balanchine's death. Commissioned by Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, it builds on familiar phrases of movement from Mr. B's Concerto Barocco, Symphony in C and Bugaku. Armitage sees it as a meditation on stability that balances "a spiritual ideal of fulfillment with a sense of longing."

Two newer pieces deliver the explosive energy that audiences have come to expect from Armitage. She describes Tango Mortale (2000) as "a wild duet, precarious and off-kilter." A brief excerpt from Schrodinger's Cat (2000), the first dance she created with the Ballet de Lorraine, reflects the dynamism of the musical score, a mix of acoustic and electronic sounds by the experimental French group Art Zoyd. "It's a raw burst of graffiti energy that takes on quite an emotional feeling," she says. "It gets to you."

Armitage grew up in the more subdued environs of Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was a research biologist. She began her dance training at age 5 with Tomi Wortham, a former member of the New York City Ballet. After further study at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the School of American Ballet and the London Dance Center, she began her professional career in 1972 with the Grand Theatre de Geneve in Switzerland, co-directed by Balanchine and Patricia Neary.

She left for New York in 1975 and joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where her daring and grace colored such abstract works as Squaregame and Channels/Inserts. It was then that she began moonlighting as a choreographer and unleashed the series of punk ballets that peaked with Drastic Classicism.

After leaving Cunningham in spring 1981, she formed her own troupe, first known as Armitage Gone! Dance and later (as she tilted from drastic to classicism) as the Armitage Ballet. But running a company made her feel like a full-time fund-raiser, so she disbanded the troupe in 1989 and took on freelance assignments with the Pads Opera Ballet and other major companies. During a stint in Los Angeles, she worked on videos for Madonna ("Vogue") and Michael Jackson ("In the Closet") and directed a short film (Hall of Mirrors).

Then, in 1995, she assumed direction of MaggioDanza di Firenze, an Italian ballet company with forty-five dancers. Her work there included choreographing a new version of Pinocchio, with costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and creating a new ballet about the rise and fall of Michael Milken, Wall Street's former junk-bond king. It was called The Predator's Ball, and when she brought it to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1996, her ballet dancers swirled in counterpoint to a crew of rappers and vogue artists recruited from New York nightclubs.

Armitage returned to New York in 1999 to create a work for Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. Called The Last Lap and set to a deceptively simple piano quartet by Shostakovich, it cast five women and one man (Baryshnikov) in a whirling, bittersweet fugue about two lovers trying to connect in a cruel world. "I was interested in contradictory forces," she says. "Will and destiny, vulnerability and strength, lyricism and turbulence."

Lately, Armitage has been reveling in the excesses of baroque opera. In Florence, she choreographed a new production of Handel's Apollo e Dafne. In Nancy, she is starting work on a new staging of Rameau's Pygmalion. Both pieces are on the New York City Opera's calendar for 2002.

What's more, they both feature sets and costumes by James Ivory, the director of such period dramas as A Room with a View and Howard's End. Their collaboration grew out of a series of chance encounters while attending two very different types of events: baroque opera and avant-garde theater and dance.

"We realized we had these seemingly opposed mutual loves," Armitage says. "It's definitely the most wild thing he ever did, and the most conservative I ever did. So the fusion has worked well for both of us."

Armitage's proclivity for contradictory impulses will be on full display at the Joyce Theater this month, particularly in Nadaswaram (1998), which is set to percussive classical music from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Armitage took waving and popping in the South Bronx style, combined it with her wild brand of ballet, and added hand positions from bharata natyam, one of India's seven classical dance forms. She even mixed in some capoeira, a martial art from Brazil.

"It becomes a whirlwind of energy in which the different flavors express an erotic vibrancy and a spiritual ambience," she says. "What I like best about it is the contrast of very lyrical, sensuous waving mixed with this intense, percussive movement style."

Armitage's itinerant career often looks like a whirlwind, too. Soon after we spoke, she packed her bags for Havana, where she had a commission for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Then she flew back to France. But the strain of living out of a suitcase is not the only reason she's looking forward to her season in New York.

"I long for an American audience," she says. "That's the exact reason I'm coming here. Though it is like bringing my lover to meet the family; it's filled with all those anxieties and hopes. But I would like to have a more ongoing dialogue with New York and with the U.S. It's about time, because what I do really is, to me, so profoundly American."

RELATED ARTICLE: DARING TO BE DIFFERENT

The Altogether Different festival brings new and out-on-a-limb dance to the Joyce Theater every winter. This year, in a staggered January 1-28 schedule, Armitage Gone! Dance alternates with six other companies.

Mark Dendy Dance and Theater performs I'm Goin' to My Room to Be Cool Now, and I Don't Want to Be Disturbed. This new work celebrates teenage self-discovery with the help of songs by Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, The Temptations and Janis Joplin.

Compagnie Flak, directed by Venezuelan-born and Montreal-based Jose Navas, dances the New York premiere of Perfume de Gardenias. Navas, who is known for bold movement and emotional integrity, researches body language in this work. "A work filled with poetry--urban, calm and decadent, crafted as skillfully as a sketch in India ink," wrote a critic in Le Devoir, a Montreal newspaper.

With an understated charm, ChameckiLerner hails from Brazil. Young choreographers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner became part of the downtown dance scene in 1993 when they created highly inventive choreography with psychological underpinnings. This program includes Poor Reality, a premiere about the process of remembering, and Antonio Caido, a piece about destiny.

The Wally Cardona Quartet combines formidable technique, techno music and structural clarity in the premiere of Trance Territory, a piece that strives to be a tribal ritual for the twenty-first century.

Irene Hultman Allstars performs her lively work, which mixes wacky movement and dramatic performance in surprising ways. This program combines contemporary dance with pop music, including the songs of Eartha Kitt and Dean Martin.

The John Jasperse Company incorporates visual elements into choreography that entangles bodies in new and odd ways. The New York premiere of Scrawl features music by James Lo; Waving to you from here is about memory, loss and endings of relationships.

The Joyce is located at 175 Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, New York City. For a detailed schedule, see www.joyce.org.

Wendy Perron 

Christopher Reardon writes about the arts for The New York Times and other major publications.