Forging an Original Contemporary Ballet
Colby dancers and musicians collaborate with the Portland Ballet to envision and execute Keepers of the Light during Jan Plan
As choreographer Annie Kloppenberg worked with a group of dancers in a Portland Ballet studio, she offered suggestions more than instructions.
“What if you …,” a sentence began. “Let’s imagine …,” started another.
The dancers responded with movement phrases, searching for the right combination of arabesques, leaps, lifts, and gestures.
“Explore what you need to do,” encouraged Kloppenberg, an affiliate artist with the company. “I trust you.”
After three or four passes, it all gelled.
This moment, and scores of others like it, reflects the process of creating an original contemporary ballet with collaboration at its heart.
“For me, collaboration is fundamental to creative practice and has been a guiding principle for a long time,” said Kloppenberg, associate professor of performance, theater, and dance and director of the Lyons Arts Lab. She is also one of three artistic directors spearheading the collaborative piece Keepers of the Light. Nell Shipman, artistic director for the Portland Ballet, and Caitlin Scholl, a musician, composer, and multidisciplinary artist, join her.
The unique collaboration brings together 20 Portland Ballet dancers, seven Colby student dancers, and four Colby student musicians who composed an original score and will perform live. Its final performances are at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 7 and 8 in the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts.
Unlike other original pieces, this one came together quickly—in about a month during Colby’s Jan Plan.
Kloppenberg called it an “adventure” with three artistic directors approaching the work with different lenses. The dancers and musicians also collaborated, giving, taking, and improvising during daily rehearsals. As an entire company, they have sculpted the individual pieces into a coherent whole through hard work in a warm and energetic studio environment full of life and laughter.
“It’s not just one group informing the other group,” said Shipman, a regular instructor at Colby, thanks to an ongoing partnership between the College and the Portland Ballet.
“Everybody brings something really valuable to the process, which translates to the product seen on the stage.”
Smarter together
Keepers of the Light takes inspiration from Maine’s landscape, history, and lighthouses as portals to explore our relationship to the land, water, and navigation. The original idea stemmed from a first-year dance project Kloppenberg co-directed at Colby with Matthew Cumbie, visiting assistant professor of performance, theater, and dance. During a rehearsal, Student Assistant Director Phoebe Elliott ’25 spun around holding a flashlight, harkening to a Maine lighthouse. When Kloppenberg and Shipman decided to collaborate on a new work, they embraced the image and began developing it.
The pair have known each other professionally for years, resulting in a synergy between Colby and the Portland Ballet. Keepers of the Light, however, is their first collaboration. It integrates each institution’s differing styles, something dancer Bella Brozic ’27 said fosters a give-and-take in the studio.
“We do a lot more contemporary dance at school, as the base movement, whereas here they do more classically based ballet. We bounce off one another in that way in this piece—and it’s really cool,” said the sophomore, who is majoring in biology with a concentration in neuroscience and minoring in English and performance, theater, and dance.
Brozic and her peers had no idea what to expect in the Jan Plan course, but they agreed the collaboration has stretched their imaginations and capabilities while boosting their confidence.
“We do a lot more of the choreography than I thought we would do,” said Presley Privitera ’25, who has danced since she was little. Her training didn’t focus on classical ballet, so this opportunity—eye-opening and challenging—was one she never imagined possible.
“It’s been nice to work alongside the company members and be a part of the piece that we’re going to show, that we contributed to ourselves,” said the biology major minoring in anthropology and Italian studies.
Input from students and professionals alike are essential to keeping the arts alive, said Shipman.
“As an artist, collaboration opens you up to more inspiration, more ideas. We are creative people, but we have our certain tendencies and get stuck in our ways,” she said. “As an artist, you’re always craving, asking, ‘What else is out there? What else can inform me? What else can feed me?”
Working with dancers and seeing what they bring to dance also strengthens Kloppenberg’s commitment to collaboration.
“I only have my body and my brain, and when I have the chance to work with 27 dancers who might make different choices than I would make, they reveal possibilities that are so much richer than those I might envision independently,” she said.
“We’re smarter together than we are separately.”
Music makers
Kloppenberg brought Scholl into the collaboration to lead the student musicians, expanding on an existing relationship that has included Scholl teaching workshops, performing at Colby, and mentoring a student.
“I love working on multidisciplinary performance. Starting an accelerated process with people coming from a lot of different backgrounds is very exciting to me because then the whole thing becomes very process-driven,” she said. “Every day is a discovery.”
Scholl and the student musicians were tasked with creating 60 minutes of music to accompany the dance performance.
“It took everyone a little bit of time to kind of figure out what we were doing, how we were going to work together, how we were going to work with the dancers as well,” said Maura McGraw ’26, a vocalist double majoring in economics and music with an English minor. Her original songwriting will publicly debut in Keepers of the Light.
McGraw’s classmates—Rafi Aronson ’27, Henry Olson ’27, and Raghav Surya ’25—have, in different combinations and settings, produced and made music together, so when they moved into their Airbnb in Portland for the month they quickly began sharing ideas and putting sound together. The students, alongside Scholl, worked through challenges together—feeling vulnerable, wanting to make the best music possible for the project, letting go of perfection—and within the first two weeks composed a significant body of music.
Part of their success came from embracing the shortened production schedule. “It’s excellence by constraint,” said Surya, an environmental policy and philosophy double major and a production manager at East Coast Music Group in Waterville.
Two of Scholl’s original pieces and several original student songs—all prerecorded—will play during the performance. The rest of the music will be played live, with many moments of improvisation, on an assortment of instruments, including a keyboard, guitars, crystal singing bowls, percussion elements, a trumpet, and a saxophone.
The improvisational component has been the most challenging and fulfilling for the musicians, who joined the dancers in the Portland studios several times a week. They watch the dancers for cues since none of the music is written down. The dancers, in turn, face the musicians and respond to their music. For the musicians, it has forced them to “rewire their brains to focus on a different visual cue,” said Olson, a double major in music and computer science with a minor in math.
They’ve also had to learn to think beyond themselves as composers and players.
“The most important process in the collaborative experience is just listening, and listening to each other,” said Aronson, who is double majoring in music and science, technology, and society and minoring in environmental studies. “Listening has been at the forefront of how we’re able to improve what we’re doing. Listening is also a visual process because we’re listening, looking, and responding to the dancers.”
The next generation of artists
Keepers of the Light uses the lighthouse as a metaphor, raising questions such as, “How much do we even know each other? How much can we understand about each other’s light?” according to Scholl.
For many of the dancers and musicians involved in the collaboration, those questions were at least partially answered.
“There’s a lot you can glean from watching the dancers’ faces and the emotion they’re trying to portray,” said Surya, who learned to work that emotion into his music and enhance it.
The student dancers, too, learned from watching the professional dancers. Not just about technique, but how to balance being a professional dancer and the need to work another job. Or how to take care of your body to avoid injury. The month at the barre and in the studio was transformative for Tyerra Osborne ’27, who wants to be a professional dancer.
“I think being in this program has allowed me to see what I can work on as a dancer,” said the sophomore double majoring in sociology and performance, theater, and dance. “Not just technique-wise, but attitude-wise. How I view dance, how I view myself, and how I want to maneuver in the dance world. It makes me excited for my future.”
Creating a pipeline for dancers like Osborne is important to Shipman.
“It’s so important to have access to the next generation of artists to put this in good hands. We have shared our voices and put our thoughts and our hearts into it so that they can carry it on with their input and inspiration for the next group of artists coming up,” said Shipman.
“That’s how it lives on,” she said. “It’s unbelievably important.”
