ABSTRACT
If, during her professional beginnings with the ballet company of the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the young American Karole Armitage made any kind of splash dancing corps de ballet roles, our dance literature doesn’t prominently record it. By 1977, however, after a year in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the wiry young woman from Kansas had come to some notice. The newcomer was paired with the choreographer himself in a duet from his new Squaregame. Furthermore, Armitage’s rangy reach and delicate control of Cunninghamian complexity told of personal distinction quite apart from that of being chosen to work directly alongside the maestro himself. With her almost pixie-like face, enigmatically impassive and framed by a precisely fringed haircut, Armitage gently drew her viewers into her expert way with Cunningham’s art. In Arlene Croce’s essay on the Cunningham season that offered the premiere of Squaregame and the local debut of Armitage, the critic singled out the ‘duet in which [Cunningham] supports the most talented of his new dancers, Karole Armitage’.
