DRASTIC CLASSIC.

How nice, in these gray days on the ballet scene, to have Karole Armitage come back to New York, in a classical mood. In the nineteen-eighties, Armitage was a big presence in the downtown dance world. That's when dance caught up with postmodernism in the other arts, and the fact that it did so was due in part to her. She had useful boyfriends--the pomo stars Rhys Chatham and David Salle--and they provided her with music and sets. She also collaborated with Charles Atlas and Jeff Koons, and her work was in that vein: hard-edged, double-toned. I remember, one night in 1988, catching up with her in a piece called "Go-Go Ballerina," at a club in the East Village. She came out in a frightening unitard--black, with a hairy black fringe--and pitched herself on top of a heart-shaped, but black leather, chocolate box (by Koons) the size of an automobile. Out of the box came a man in a T-shirt imprinted with a skull and crossbones. She bit his chest. He hauled her around by her thighs. It wasn't much, but it stuck in your head.

Armitage's work was more than edge, however. It was also classical ballet, the technique in which she had been trained. In 1985, she presented a long pas de deux for herself and Joseph Lennon, an excellent dancer who also looked as though he might own a motorcycle. He wore a black leather skirt; she wore five-inch spike heels, with which, repeatedly, she grazed his head. One of them, you figured, was going to get killed before the night was out. But, instead, this cold transaction slowly became more intimate, questioning ("If I try this, will you help me?"), and the means was classical partnering: he catching her, she holding on to him, as her long, strong legs inscribed in the air their advanced mathematics. (The original title of the piece was "-p = dH/dq." Probably at the behest of a press agent, it was later renamed "The Watteau Duets.") This was a time when feminists were saying that classical ballet, by its very nature, demeaned women. The woman was held, she was lifted; ergo, she was a plaything. Armitage showed the opposite.

And she went further. Ballet is very crotchy. Apart from gymnastics, it is the only job in which a female is allowed to make public use of the structures between her legs as an element of design. This may be one reason that so many girls want to go into ballet: they can use their whole bodies, just like men, and nobody makes rude comments. Indeed, no one comments at all. The Sugar Plum Fairy may turn, in supported arabesque, and show her full lower anatomy to four thousand opera-house patrons, and nobody says a word. Armitage did say a word, or her work did. She took the pelvic action of the ballerina and pushed it further. Those legs were always open. She thereby extended ballet technique and got herself a reputation.

It wasn't always a good reputation. The glossy magazines loved Armitage--"the punk princess of the downtown scene," Vanity Fair called her--and a lot of thinking people admired her, but the daily critics tended to see her as a matter of fashion rather than of art. "A cultural con job," Clive Barnes, of the Post, called a piece that Armitage made for American Ballet Theatre in 1985. "Little talent, much pretension," the Times' Anna Kisselgoff said of another piece. Such reviews did not help her career, but a bigger problem was that the look of her work was so trendy, and that the trend--the eighties, Soho style--was passing. There were other discouragements, too. It is very hard to run a small pickup company such as she had in those years. She needed to be working for a big company, but by the late eighties most classical troupes in America ...