Printer Friendly Version - Shall We Dance?

How can you tell spring is coming? Daffodils poking up in the garden, robins digging up worms, and high schools putting on their spring musical.

This year, Valley Regional High School (VRHS) is doing Little Shop of Horrors, a musical that had a long run on Broadway and then was made into a successful movie. It isn’t your standard musical comedy about love, loss, and everything coming up roses in the end. It is a dark comedy, amusing and tuneful, to be sure, about a flower shop with a real problem: a huge plant that devours human flesh and blood.

For Alison Charbonnier, who is doing the choreography for the show, the production marks a full circle. When she was a VRHS student, she was in the spring musical all four high school years.

At a recent interview, Alison wore a front zip jacket with Little Shop of Horrors written on the front and Don’t Feed the Plants, a pointed reference to the show’s story line, emblazoned on the back.

A modern dance teacher and performer, Alison brings a lifetime of experience to the job. She began taking modern dance lessons in Centerbrook when she was 4 years old.

Longtime play director Ingrid Walsh was eager to bring Alison’s experience in modern dance to the production. “Ingrid wanted to incorporate movements that were not typical. It is not a modern dance show, but there is a different type of movement,” Alison says. “It is not The Little Mermaid.”

Modern dance, Alison explains, concentrates more on individual expression than formatted routines. She notes that the names most often associated by the general public with the form are Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan, and more recently, Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, and Paul Taylor.

In working with the cast, Alison brings her own ideas to the dance movements but also solicits suggestions from the dancers on how each number should be designed and performed.

Though Alison has long experience as a choreographer, she had never done the dance routines for a show that had been a Broadway and movie success. Once she signed on to oversee the dancing, she was adamant about not seeing the hit movie, so it would not influence her own choreographic ideas. She adds that Guilford High School is also doing Little Shop of Horrors this spring, and she is eager to see how that cast approaches the production.

Alison says she learned a great deal about the process of putting together a musical from director Walsh, with whom she talked over each of the dance numbers as a preliminary to creating the choreography. “Everything has to further the story. How we move, what we do next, it all has to further the story,” Alison says.

Now an Essex resident, Alison grew up in Deep River. Her mother and father, Linda and Ray Oakes, own Celebrations on Deep River Main Street, which will celebrate its 41st anniversary next September. Alison worked in the store in high school, and she still works there today.

Alison, who graduated from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, was involved in dance as an undergraduate but had not yet focused on it as a career. Her major was anthropology and her minor Russian.

After college, she contemplated getting an advanced degree in environmental studies, doing a program that bussed students around the country to work on different sustainable environmental projects. She decided against it when she realized that the program would leave her no time to dance.

Instead, she got a master’s degree in dance and dance education from Columbia University Teachers College and worked bringing concepts of dance and motion to New York City Public School students and teachers through Creative Arts Laboratory and the Ballet Bridges project of New York City Ballet. Alison has also taught at Iona College in New Rochelle, as well as in various summer workshops. She now teaches at Eastern Connecticut Ballet in East Lyme.

For over 20 years, she has collaborated on creating and performing with Liliana Amador-Marty whom she originally partnered with as a result of a dance reunion at Bates.

Alison is 5 feet 10 inches tall. Her dance partner is 5 feet tall. Alison says the height difference has never been a problem. In fact, she says, all types of bodies are suitable for dance. “I don’t believe there is just one body type for all dance people,” she says. It’s about the ability to move. It’s so much more interesting with different body types.”

Alison says she does not get nervous when she performs herself but she does get nervous for her students. She praises the cast of Little Shop of Horrors. “They come in, they are ready to go, they are enthusiastic,” she says. “They are creative, funny, serious, and committed to the show.”

During the upcoming performances, Alison says she will be backstage “feeling all the energy, knowing they are doing a great job.”

Tickets on sale at Valley Regional High School and at Celebrations in Deep River.

Alison Charbonnier says Guilford High School is also doing Little Shop of Horrors this spring and she is eager to see how that cast approaches the production, since she is working on the same show at Valley Regional High School. Photo courtesy of Alison Charbonnier