Choreography
In 1978, she created her first piece as a choreographer piece titled Ne, then followed by Drastic-Classicism in 1981. Throughout the 1980s, Armitage led her own company, which was based in New York City. Her company toured internationally and was known for its collaborations with artists David Salle and Jeff Koons. In 1984, she was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to create a work for the American Ballet Theatre. Three years later, Rudolph Nureyev commissioned one of her works for the Paris Opéra Ballet. She created five ballets for the Ballet de l'Opéra National de Paris during the 1980s.
From 1995 to 1998, she served as the director and choreographer of the company MaggioDanza in Florence, Italy, moving on to become resident choreographer of the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, in 1999, where she was to remain until 2002. In 2004, she was the director of the International Festival of Contemporary Dance at the Venice Biennale. Returning to New York City after 15 years abroad, she founded her current company, Armitage Gone! Dance, in 2005.
Armitage's recent collaborators include British composer Thomas Adès, artists; Jeff Koons Jean-Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix, Brice Marden, David Salle, Peter Speliopoulos, and Broadway designers; Clifton Taylor, and Philip Taaffe. She has commissioned music from many composers and her company regularly performs to live music. The themes of her pieces are as diverse as Audubon's Birds of America. In a recent work "Three Theories" was inspired by Brian Greene's popular science book The Elegant Universe. This premiered at the 2010 World Science Festival (the physics of black holes and string theory).
Armitage stated that "Physics makes me dream. I try to think outside the box and open up my mind. I like science. Science always questions authority. This conflict between theories seemed to me so dramatic and so incredibly fundamental."
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