When the night begins with three girls wearing delicate, white, lacy dresses as they dance to the classical sounds of Schubert and Prokofiev, one expects to see a traditional ballet. However, Annie Kloppenberg’s ‘Caution: Flammable,’ at Cambridge’s Green Street Studio, is anything but conventional.
Last Friday night’s opening of a two-performance run featured eight short pieces, choreographed by Kloppenberg and performed by 18 different dancers, including the choreographer herself. The performance was part of the studio’s ‘Emerging Artists Series,’ which, through a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council, helps new choreographers produce their first show.
Each piece was based on conflicts confronting adolescent girls and women. Rather than each dance standing alone, Kloppenberg assembled the dances like a collection of stories, creating each piece with attention to the whole performance. The program explains that she has drawn on her personal experiences, which the performers must then translate into dance.
The Green Street Studio is easy to overlook. It’s an unimpressive, old building tucked tightly away amongst the other indistinguishable buildings lining Cambridge’s small one-way streets. The inside, for the most part, matches the exterior. The actual performance didn’t take place on a stage, but rather in a small room packed with about 100 audience members on folding chairs. Still, the studio’s informal, musty atmosphere enhanced the performance by adding a personal touch.
The third dance, titled ‘All Dressed Up and No Place to Go’ was by far unique. It began with a white chair in the center of the dance floor, before a dancer placed the bottom half of a mannequin on it. Then followed a succession of girlseach bringing with them another piece of the mannequin: the torso and head, each arm and a wig. With the audience waiting, imagining how the dancers will incorporate this set up in their performance, the PA system emitted a recorded laughter and the stage lights were dimmed, ending the piece and leaving the audience to question its meaning.
Another particularly striking piece was ‘Here I Stand,’ performed by Ruth Shiman-Hackett, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Her solo dance was based on her own poetry and enhanced by sound effects of everything from crickets to planes to ticking clocks. The highly emotional and well-executed dance ended with the feigned wobbling of her legs, giving the dramatic appearance of a girl looking as if she is about to break, as the lights slowly faded and hid the distressed look on her face.
Sound was used effectively throughout the show, ranging from classical music to the sounds of Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday to more modern techno music. The most creative audio was featured in ’38-18-33,’ during which the fuzzy sound of a radio scanning through stations was intermittently played throughoutchanging the music to match the dancer’s evolving moods.
The choreographer’s combination of traditional ballet with modern dance, in order to portray repeated themes of loneliness, trust, power and vulnerability, demanded a lot of imagination from the audience. With each piece open to interpretation, the choreography allowed the audience to debate for hours the symbolic undertones and meaning of each piece without reaching a consensus.
That seemed to be Kloppenberg’s intention, as she invited the audience to ‘experience the evening in whatever way you see fit-to make your own sense of the worlds presented, the questions asked, answered and unanswered.’
And at the end of the hour, many questions were left unanswered, a product of the performance’s ability to keep the audience pondering and interpreting long after the show was over.