Armitage Gone! Dances with Natural History

At Dance Spirit, we’re all about choreographers finding inspiration in unusual places. (Like when we learned that a “Monty Python” comedic recording sparked a piece by Gallim Dance’s Andrea Miller, or that Justin Peck’s ideas sometimes come to him while he’s bike riding.) So when we heard iconic contemporary ballet choreographer Karole Armitage was creating a new work to be performed in the American Museum of Natural History, we were pretty intrigued.

Set among the wildlife dioramas in the museum’s Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, Armitage’s On the Nature of Things tackles the topic of climate change and its effects on our planet. It’s a heavy subject, but it’s not the first time the choreographer has turned to science. Three Theories, a 2010 work for her company, Armitage Gone! Dance, touched on quantum mechanics, String Theory and the Theory of Relativity. And Armitage’s Four Seasons—a Spinning Planet (2014) was a call to protect nature and the animals that inhabit it. (As it turns out, Armitage spent her childhood summers in the Colorado Mountains, often attending lectures with her father—a biologist—at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Loving nature is basically in her DNA.)

Armitage Gone! Dance in Three Theories (via armitagegonedance.org)

Ahead of the site-specific work’s March 25th debut, Armitage Gone! released several chilling images from a photo shoot held in the AMNH. Check out the photos below, and visit the museum’s website for more details and to get tickets.

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