What Your Body Knows That Words Can’t Say

RM299_Kloppenberg

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. And we are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, which is actually where I met our guest today. This is Annie Kloppenberg and she's got many titles, but I want to make sure that I put them out there in the world. Professor of performance, theater and dance, Colby College, inaugural director, Lyons Arts Lab and affiliate artist, Portland Ballet. Annie, so many things that you're doing. So welcome. Thanks for coming in and taking the time to talk with us today.

Annie Kloppenberg: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So your connection to Maine is through Colby College, I believe.

Annie Kloppenberg: I moved here in 2010 when I got the job at Colby. So I'm in my 16th year. Prior to that though, I had spent a decade at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine. So I'd spent basically six weeks every summer in Maine. So I felt like I was already partially familiar with the state.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: And you also chose to go to Middlebury. So of course it's not Maine, but it is New England. So you must have sort of an affinity, I would think, to the Northern Northeast.

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. I grew up outside of Boston. So definitely a New Englander through and through. I was born in California, but didn't live there for any amount of time that's worth noting. And I knew what I was looking for ... My father's a professor and my mother ran a daycare center at a college. So we were in academic circles growing up and I knew that I wanted a small college that would be an intimate community, small class sizes. And so Middlebury was the right place for me. And then fast forward when I was thinking about where I might want to teach, I was really interested in that kind of environment. And so I was living in New York and working as an independent artist there and doing just fine, teaching yoga and Pilates. And I applied to three jobs and Colby just was the right fit. And so then I up and moved to Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So tell me about some of your early influences. What was it about dance in particular that caused you to think, oh, I think I could do this for my life?

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. So well, I've always been a mover. I was an athlete. I was a soccer player. I still play tennis and I danced a lot. I danced in high school probably about 25 hours a week. And I actually had some ... I wasn't fully aware at the time because I hadn't studied dance history, but both of my primary dance teachers kind of occupied really interesting moments in American dance history. One came from a family that actually owned the rights to these historical early modern dance by Ruth St. Denis. One of the sort of early, often referred to as pioneers of American modern dance and modern dance in general. And then the other teacher had danced at Radio City and in Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe as a ballet dancer in the sort of pre-New York City ballet, post Vaudeville era where ballet was kind of this virtuosic fascination that was kind of alongside other kinds of performances in this way that we don't see it anymore. And had studied with Ted Shawn at Jacob's Pillow. And so I wasn't super aware until I learned more about history, how kind of embedded they were in really important ways. And then I mentioned that my mother worked at a college at Wellesley College. She ran a childcare center. And so that kind of experiential education and value of play, a value of experimentation, I think was threaded throughout my upbringing, along with my dad's work. My father was a professor of intellectual history. And so I had the great privilege of traveling a lot. And we spent quite a bit of time in Europe every couple of years and lots of time in museums. Both my parents really have an aesthetic sensibility and are lovers of art. And so it just was always a part of my life. I never really thought that I would pursue dance. I went to Middlebury in part because they had a beautiful dance studio, but just because I liked the community, I liked the place. And there was a turning point in, I think it was October of my second year, early in the fall. And I was after class, just I think stretching in the studio. And one of my professors said to me, "Annie, what are you doing right now?" And I don't think I was going anywhere important. And so she said, "Well, this guest company is coming in. Why don't you stick around and watch them?" And so the company was BB Miller Dance Company and they were doing a piece called Going to the Wall. And so they came in and they started warming up and I was instantly fascinated. I hadn't seen dance like this before. I'd been involved in my first year at Middlebury, but I wasn't totally convinced that this modern dance thing was for me. That piece really changed my perspective on dance. It was dynamic and a kind of physicality that was really engaging, but it was also political and poetic and about identity and about race and gender and sexuality and all of these things that I hadn't seen done in dance before. And the sound score was the Fuji's, which was like the top album at the time, so it was cool also. And so after seeing that piece, I went into one of my other professor's office and I said, "Okay, how do I learn more about this? I'm in." And so that summer I went to both the American Dance Festival and the Bates Dance Festival. So that was nine weeks of eight hours a day of dancing and seeing generally two to three shows per week. And so that sort of was the catalyst for my really wanting to take dance seriously. And then my first job was teaching and I was making work in Boston. I moved on and did that in New York, did some arts administration, a variety of other things. I sort of remained open to taking a turn. And so, I mean, I think people often use the rhetoric of passion like, "Oh, I'm passionate about my art." I don't really feel that way. It's just the thing that keeps me curious. It's different every day. It's a lens through which I make sense of things that I experience or see or maybe don't make sense of them, right? It feels like an act of posing questions, but I think that's the thing that keeps driving me back to it, is really a sense of curiosity.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So when you talk about modern dance, I mean, I think a lot of people understand to some extent ballet. They have a picture in their mind as to what it means to go to a ballet, but talk to me more about modern dance. What does that mean? What does it invoke?

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. Yeah. So I sort of use the term modern and contemporary interchangeably. I use contemporary, I think more often now, meaning it's just of the now. It's a little confusing in the US because it's also a genre that we see in dance competitions and things like that. But globally, it just means sort of now and modern tends to be tied to a historical time period. So there are certain kind of aesthetic principles that are about groundedness and curve linearity and that underpin the way that modern or contemporary dance has evolved. But I think of it as a more malleable kind of movement vocabulary that allows us to explore. And I think actually ballet does that too. More and more ballet companies all over the world are doing contemporary programs on a really regular basis. And so that form too is evolving. And I think there's a lot more proximity to the way that ballet, contemporary ballet artists are working and contemporary artists, but basically it's a more flexible movement vocabulary,

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think. You also have an interesting relationship with visual art, meaning art that perhaps we see on the wall, like art that I have next to me right here. One of our artists, Carlos Gamez de Francisco, he's somebody that you've gravitated towards. Talk to me about that.

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. So actually this work that I've been building, which premieres this weekend on Saturday, is in part inspired by his work. And so there was a piece a few years ago, I can't remember exactly how long it was, but a piece of his, it was kind of a small ... I think I should have bought it. If anybody out there owns it, I think I should buy it from you. But it was a woman and she kind of had hair, my color, and it was these braids out to the side and it was small and it had his ... And I didn't know anything about him at the time, but I was enamored of this piece. And every time I went into the gallery, I would find it and to spend some time looking at it. And so it made me kind of curious. And I started to learn a little bit more about him through, of course, at first the Portland Art Gallery webpage and have since done some more research into his work. But with this piece that I'm making now, I was kind of assembling what felt like the right amount of source material to put together to kind of activate the creative spirit, I guess, the ideas that would be generative for the work. And the premise of this year's new works program for Portland Ballet is local partners. And so each of the choreographers that's making a piece is collaborating with a local entity. And I already had in place a collaboration with the composer of the work, Andrew Conklin and the musicians who were playing it, the splice ensemble, neither of which is based in Portland. So I reached out to Emma at the gallery and sort of said, "Hey, can we work together on this?" And so that became sort of a third element to the piece that I wanted to explore. And then in looking deeper into his work, I learned of course that he was trained as a dancer and that I found some of these kind of live paintings, the embodiment, the way he uses embodiment as an artist is really interesting to me. And so I've just been learning more about him and about his work. And I think one of the things that pulls me to it is the sort of sense of mystery, sense of whimsy, sense of theatricality, the colors, the textures, the references to history that are sort of imprecise and that are illusions rather than replicas. And I think that's also something that I really try and do in my work is leave room for ... There's a little bit of ambiguity, right? Which is not something that I think Americans are super comfortable with, but that's something that I really love about the art, is actually the ambiguity, the way that we bring ourselves to what we see and how we make sense of it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So if you were describing to someone the work that is going on at Colby and the work that you're doing in collaboration with the Portland Ballet, and you're talking about this idea of ambiguity, how would you put that into words in a conversation?

Annie Kloppenberg: You mentioned earlier ballet, right? And often ballet is a linear story. So, and I sometimes say the reason we know what the story is is because we read it in the program and pantomime. And so this is a sense of, when I think of ambiguity, I think of a sense of a non-linear story, the way that we read humanity in somebody that we walk by on the street or sitting alone in a cafe. And I do this all the time. I sort of make up stories about people based on what I'm seeing in their bodies and what they're reading or who's next to them. And so I think my mentor BeBe calls it storiness, but I think that's something that's at work in Carlos' work, but also in my work and in contemporary dance is this sense of everybody has a story. We all have many stories that we can assemble in a way that gives us our humanity rather than sort of here's a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end. So I think that that might be what I'm referencing when I think about ambiguity is a sense of circular story, background, things that inform how we are and who we are, if that makes sense.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah. I mean, it does. And one of the things that I've continued to really adore about having conversations like these is building my own vocabulary around different types of artistic and creative practices. And I appreciate that you're willing to take something that is so physical and try to fit it into spoken word, which is challenging. It's really challenging because you can be present in a performance and you can have feelings and you can have thoughts. And then when somebody afterwards says, "Well, tell me about that performance." Sometimes it's hard to kind of encapsulate it into whatever it was your experience was. So I truly am, you're being able to do that on the spot right here, I just think is fantastic.

Annie Kloppenberg: Well, I think it's so important too, because I think that's for me, one of the things that I love about experiencing art is when I feel something in my body that is unfamiliar, that I have to kind of wrestle with, but it's also destabilizing in a way. And so I think that's something that sometimes people feel like, "Oh, I don't get it," or whether it's dance or something else, right? There's some fear about not understanding. And so I think it's really important that we're able to use as precise language as possible to talk about, even if it's something that is a little bit uncertain, but to talk about what we're seeing, what we're making, what we're experiencing with as much precision as possible, because it gives us more access to ideas and also helps alleviate some of that fear. I think people sometimes use the term interpretive dance, which our dance artists don't often use because mostly because it's most often used pejoratively, but I think that's used when people kind of don't understand, right? Which I recognize, like trying to assign a name to something that makes it palatable or makes it make sense. So I think that's something people are recognizing in a kind of movement that doesn't have a linear story, a sense of like, there's something at work there, right? There's ideas behind it and I don't quite know how to articulate what those are. So I think that's kind of where that term comes from.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You raise a really interesting idea and that is that words and details matter because it enables you to engage in conversation and it does create a shared dialogue and also taken too far a word like interpretive can be pejorative that some people ... I might say interpretive and I might think this is the way that a person looks at the spring flowers and then it manifests into the art that they create, but coming from the background that you're describing, somebody else might say, well, no, that's people think that it's, well, whatever the negative thing that there is. And so that idea around language, it can be both. It can be very helpful in the naming sometimes. And also when it becomes a label that people don't accept themselves, it's a fine line to kind of navigate, I think.

Annie Kloppenberg: I think so too. Using language as a practice also.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: The other thing I'm really relating to what you're saying as we're talking is this idea of what we hold in our bodies and the stories that we hold in our bodies, and obviously as a doctor, what I look at when people are say walking down the hall is what is the imbalance, what is the dysfunction, what is the past history that might have contributed to whatever it is I'm seeing in their gait. And I think you also have a background, yoga, pilates, physical therapy. I think you've done some work in that area, but you're also, what do people hold in their bodies and what can their bodies then be used either by themselves or in concert with other people to bring forward in story? So it's such an interesting, I guess, parallel and divergence.

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. Yeah. And there's, I think more and more research about how people actually hold memory in various parts of our flesh. But I think it's something that, again, I think I mentioned earlier kind of destabilizing, but I think we're all familiar with experiencing things in our body and the word emotion contains motion and yet that's part of what makes something that's unfamiliar so destabilizing because it's felt, right? And it's a sensation maybe that's new and confusing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, that's true because you can be living in your head and be thinking, "Oh, I like this piece. It's got nice colors. It's got nice form." Or you can be listening to something and you can feel yourself engaging with it in a way that's really beautiful. And at the same time, you can also be, something can rise up and this was the boyfriend that I had back in high school and this was a piece that we were listening to in the car right before we broke up with one another. There's just like this interesting back and forth that things rise up that maybe you didn't realize were still there.

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. And I think, I mean, that's also important to me in terms of how I make work. I work really collaboratively. So I don't come in with the dance already choreographed and teach it to people or with the sort of non-linearity that I've been talking about in terms of experience is also embedded in the creative process. And so I really value the voices and the embodiment of each of the dancers that I work with. So there's a ... I always, in my program credits, I'm really committed to saying in collaboration with performers, but I think that gives each piece important texture that the individuals who are performing it have been a part of actually generating the vocabulary that is inside of it. And then it becomes this whole other thing when you're resetting work that was created with one cast and a new people are embodying it, and it allows it to sort of gather more depth because there's more embodied history in the texture and quality of the movement. But every piece that I make has contributions from the collaborators who are in it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So that's why the precision of language must be really an interesting thing to try to work with. If you've got, say you're working with the Colby Art Museum, you're working with the Portland Ballet, you're working with people in music, in the pieces that you're doing at Colby, and maybe that's not classical music. So all of those different groups are going to have a slightly different usage of language. And so when you're trying to, when you're working with collaborative in a collaborative environment, like really translating back and forth, I would think that's kind of an interesting process.

Annie Kloppenberg: And trying to avoid jargon too, right? How can we all come to the table and understand each other? I mentioned my dad was a college professor also, and so as such, my most important teacher of writing, because he was willing to spend time looking at writing with me from high school on. And he used to say, every sentence needs to be the best sentence you've ever written, which is a lot of pressure, but it really, that's an attitude towards examining language that I think is really important and part that an approach that I take when I teach writing also that finding the most efficient and most clear way of expressing something, which might not be the fanciest, right? And it becomes a practice of composing rhythm also. I'm really interested in writing in punctuation and rhythm and sentence structure and varying that to make dynamic choices, which is a kind of choreography too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So I'm wondering, and this is kind of just throwing it out there and maybe there's no answer, maybe you have an answer you thought about. I don't really know, but I'll just ask because I've found it interesting, the more we are interfacing with the digital world, the less physical I think many people are becoming. I certainly know this about when we were going through COVID, a lot of people were working from home, they weren't actually going into a space, they were working in their own little space. And do you think that that has an impact now today on people and how they use their bodies, whether it's just showing up in the world or in a storytelling kind of manner? Or do you think that people's bodies just adjust over time? Do you have thoughts on any of this?

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah, that's so interesting. I think it must. I think the cleanest way I can answer that is by the things that I observe in students and teaching college students, they were all at a slightly different kind of developmental point during the pandemic. And so the seniors who are graduating now, when they came in as first year students, there was this real thirst for togetherness. And my colleague and I do a first year dance project every year, and that was the biggest one we'd ever had. And it was about a third people who had never danced before, a third of people with lots of dance experience, and a third people who had danced a little bit and stopped at 14 or 15 or something like that. But something about that moment really just drew a big cluster of people to want to be together in community and in their bodies. And so that felt like a kind of turning point. And I think we haven't seen that kind of volume of students gravitating to that particular project, but I do think that there's, we're emerging out of the pandemic, there was a lot of fear of kind of just being near people. And so I do see that kind of fading and that there's more of a sense of catharsis in community and wanting to be together. But yeah, that's so interesting. Thinking also about how people are working more and more remotely still since the pandemic, which is, I say still, but being still in their bodies, I think I need to think more about that. I like it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your letting me ask this question that I'm not sure that we have answers to yet. When I think about the potential impact even within a generation, epigenetics, for example, I mean, we actually know that our DNA changes. We used to think, oh, it's what we hand down to the next group of people that come after us, but that's not actually true. What's actually happening is our engagement with the environment is modifying us as individuals. So when it comes to being physical or not being physical, where does that kind of lead us, I guess, is the question. Again, I appreciate your kind of working with me to try to understand this better even as I'm not sure we do understand it as a culture right now.

Annie Kloppenberg: Yeah. I do still feel like we're changed from the pandemic experience, but it is hard to pinpoint exactly how.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You've said that you stay in dance because it kept you curious and I love this idea of curiosity and I'm wondering how curiosity has shaped your creative process.

Annie Kloppenberg: I think it's present at every moment and as I've progressed in my career, I actually come in with less and less pre-prepared, if that makes sense. And putting myself in the rehearsal studio, in the room as an observer and able to follow something that I see that I'm not anticipating and either further it or frame it or develop it. But I think that that sense of trying to release some of the pressure that comes with creating something, right? There's a deadline, there's a moment that the curtain's going to go up and you've got to have a thing there, but to really be in the space in an authentic way that allows me to kind of see possibility and see possibility that I couldn't predict because of the other people who are in the space with me. I mentioned earlier the sort of turning point that made me want to take Dance Seriously is this piece by BeBe Miller, who later became my mentor in grad school and beyond, and she also has ties to Maine actually. But the first time that I worked with her was the summer before I went to grad school and I got really interested in watching, it was a big, big rep piece at the Bates Dance Festival actually with a lot of people. And so when I wasn't involved in the thing that was being rehearsed, she always noticed something that I would never have noticed. So I got really interested in watching the way that her attention was placed on the circumstances because the thing that she picked out to enhance was always brilliant, but never the thing that I would have first noticed. And so I think since then I've observed myself kind of noticing how people pay attention. And I think of that as an element of choreography too, that yes, we're choreographing particular action in time and space with some amount of illumination, sound, perhaps a set, this piece that I'm making right now has some moving set items, but you're also choreographing people's attention, which kind of zooms in and zooms out and fades away sometimes and that's okay, right? It's sort of how do you give people permission to retreat a little bit and then reignite their focus. And so yeah, I think about that a lot when I'm making choices in my work is about this kind of attentional ride rather than necessarily ... Sometimes when I'm working with dancers, I'm like, "Just do like some kind of turn and we'll refine it later." So I'll identify like this sort of thing needs to happen, we'll come up with the details later. It's almost like sketching something and then filling it in later. But I think that's really important is kind of being curious about how people pay attention because we all do that slightly differently.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I find this idea of emergence really appealing. I mean, what you're describing is this sort of organic arising, but it's mindful, there's an intentionality to it. So you're allowing space, but you're also making sure that you set the space so that it sort of furthers the possibility that these things will arise, which I honestly love because I think this co-arising that can occur when you bring lots of different people with their own creative selves into one area and what you come up with often is so surprising. As you think about, I mean, you've honestly created a space in Maine that feels different to me than some of the things that ... I mean, Maine has had a rich dance history, but you've brought your own flavor to the state. Is there more that you'd like to accomplish as you're here or even in your professional life more? What do you see yourself doing next?

Annie Kloppenberg: Well, I'm really happy in my position at Colby. I get to teach and my ... So yes, I'm a professor, but the latest part of my title that you mentioned is the director of the Lyons Arts Lab, which is a multi-arts program. And it is now in its third year. And lab is a little bit of a misnomer because it's not a physical space yet. We're working on a building, but it's support for students to do creative projects and that leading that is its own creative process and I'm finding lots of opportunities to collaborate with my colleagues in different fields across campus just to support student ideas. I mean, we're also collaborating sort of pedagogically and in other ways, and when students come to me in a discipline that is not my home discipline, I sort of get to work with them to figure out how to develop and enhance their ideas and structure a circumstance of making that allows them to be curious It allows them to grow as artists. I feel like there's more work to be done with this program. I'm actually hiring somebody to join me and help administer the program right now, so that's exciting. But I do see some clear investment in that at Colby. One of the cornerstones of that program is mentorship. We're able to bring in artists from outside the college to work with students on projects when they're in areas that aren't represented in our faculty, or if it's just beyond the scope of what we as faculty can handle, because we're very busy teaching and doing all kinds of things. And so that also has been an opportunity for me to connect with artists who are local and more than local. But when I sort of say like, "Oh, I need to find somebody who makes their own instruments. Do you know anyone who do that?" So this has been a fun way for me to learn, to expand my network by asking people who they know and getting to know a variety of kinds of people that way. So that's becoming a fun way for me to connect with other artists in the state beyond my field. And I've had different kind of seasons of my career at Colby and of course as a faculty person, part of our responsibility is research. And so for me, I do some scholarly research, some writing and mostly creative research. And for a while, my dance company was located in Boston for the first six or seven years that I was here. So I spent weekends leaving basically. And then I made a shift and I was sort of bringing people here to work with me who were collaborators that I'd worked with in the past and had been located kind of all over the place, New York, DC, Boston. And then in the last several years, I've been established as an affiliate artist with the Portland Ballet, making a new work for them every year. And that feels really good. It feels like I have this kind of artistic home. And it's a few minutes from my house. And so I get to kind of exercise that creative muscle sometime in the winter every year. And so I think that, you know, I'm hoping that'll continue for at least a few years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm very impressed with all the work that you're doing. I've really enjoyed the conversation that we've had. It's something I think about a lot, which is the intersection between the different types of artistic pursuits. And obviously with the art gallery, we do a lot of the visual, but you're talking about how you can bring the visual to life in a really different way than I often think about it. So I appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me today.

Annie Kloppenberg: Thank you. And thanks for asking such interesting questions.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I hope you'll come to another one of our openings.

Annie Kloppenberg: Oh, I sure will.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah.

Annie Kloppenberg: Whenever I can.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Absolutely. We'll continue the conversation then.

Annie Kloppenberg: Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with Annie Kloppenberg. She is the professor of performance, theater and dance at Colby College. She's also the inaugural director of the Lyons Arts Lab and an affiliate artist with the Portland Ballet. I encourage you to find out more about Annie's work and because obviously we're going to have her back at another one of our Portland Art Gallery openings, then maybe we can all get together and we can look at the Carlos Gamez de Francisco pieces and other things that inspire Annie. But in the meantime, look her up online, see what she's doing, maybe go to one of her performances, see what her students are doing, and sort of gain inspiration from the type of creativity that she's engaging in. Thanks again.

Annie Kloppenberg: Thank you.