No Wimps Allowed : Dance: The former ‘Punk Princess’ of ballet is looking for guys to dance with Madonna. Wanna-Be’s need not apply.

As she chats about her life and work between mouthfuls at a favorite downtown cafe one afternoon, Karole Armitage may seem the quintessential Bohemian enjoying a leisurely brunch. But this is, in fact, a rare moment of repose for Armitage, a working meal squeezed in before an afternoon of auditions for Madonna’s spring concert tour, which Armitage will choreograph, and only a few hours before her departure for a four-month stay in Los Angeles.

Despite the demise this past fall of her seven-member ballet troupe, the 34-year-old dancer and choreographer has a bulging calendar. Besides choreographing Madonna’s rock concert, she will be working on TV and film projects, performing and also teaching.

Heartland meets SoHo would be one way to describe Armitage, a native of Lawrence, Kan., who has called New York City home for more than a decade. Her voice is heavy on Midwestern twang; in a style most antithetical to New York natives, she punctuates her pauses, with an engaging smile of a hot-pink painted mouth. The trademark bleached-blond fringe bangs (the rest of her hair cropped boyishly short) are a vestige of the punk era, yet Armitage manages to project a wholesome earnestness.

Although her future projects are more commercial in nature, she maintains they represent a less marked departure from her previous work than might seem at first glance.

“I’ve always used street dancing in my work,” she said. “What Madonna liked about it was the theatricality, the humor, the fact that it’s not one-dimensional.”

Audiences at Armitage’s ballets were just as likely to recognize the influence of Balanchine in her work as that of Smokey Robinson (“I think of them as equally great,” she once said.) or Merce Cunningham, with whose modern dance company she performed in the early ‘80s.

Popular culture has always been a real nourishment for dance, Armitage said. “It’s an old-fashioned idea to even separate high and low art any more.”

Although she will first begin to choreograph for the Madonna concert in earnest when the dancers have been selected, Armitage says that the steps will be composed of “real, real funk dancing--with some wild moments, but also with some virtuoso stuff.”

Indeed, auditions for dancers, held in Los Angeles (and closed to the press) last week, were advertised as “Madonna World Tour 1990, Karole Armitage Choreographer, Open Audition for Fierce Male Dancers who know the meaning of Troop Style, Beat Boy and Vogue. Wimps and Wanna-Be’s need not apply!”

In her work with Madonna, Armitage says she has gone from working with a company of serious dancers to a single serious dancer.

“Madonna was a dancer. That was her first interest,” Armitage said. “That’s what she originally came to New York to do. She’s a sophisticated observer of dance, and a very good dancer.”

Besides the Madonna tour, upcoming Armitage premieres include choreography for a feature film titled “Without You I’m Nothing” starring Sandra Bernhard, to be released later this year, a dance film for the BBC and a series of performances in Japan. In the planning stages are a film about Josephine Baker, for which Armitage would choreograph the dance scenes, and a possible collaboration with her live-in companion, artist David Salle, on a film about Pinocchio.

This summer, Armitage will teach and choreograph at the first of what is hoped will become an annual summer dance workshop in Crested Butte, Colo., where she recently bought a house. Part of the summer will also be spent at Cal State Humboldt in a dance residency with the systemwide Cal State Summer Arts Program.

All of Armitage’s projects promise to be a departure from her choreography for the stage, and, she hopes, a departure from her status as ballet bad girl as well. For years, Armitage tottered on the edge of respectability and financial solvency.

Her ballets, which more often than not were performed in clubs because of a dearth of theater space, were always infused with elements of pop culture. Armitage was dubbed the “Punk Princess” of the ballet world. While her new-wave iconoclastic choreography and sleek-looking productions thrilled audiences, they often ruffled the dance establishment, and offended critics, leaving her with a checkered reputation as an artist.

Her work seen at the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, “The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler,” was pronounced by critic Martin Bernheimer as a “brash array of musical and scenic elements” with a “narrow range of kinetic ideas . . .”

But battling on the front lines of the New York dance scene is what Armitage has been doing lately and on this day, Armitage’s fresh-faced manner is slightly tempered by a trace of weariness.

“The dance world in New York is a place where there is so much struggle, and so little support for doing things that go against the established grain of what dance ought to be,” Armitage said.

The Armitage Ballet folded just as it seemed that the company might be on the verge of cementing its status in the New York dance world, she said, because its government funding wasn’t renewed.

“I had to work about 12 hours a day, between fund-raising, working on choreography, and administration. I just decided if there was no help from the established dance world, then it was time to move on,” Armitage said.