
Culture & Community | Dance | Arts & Culture | Community Heroes | Kwanzaa | Arts & Anti-racism
Elaine Peters at last year's Caribbean Heritage Festival on the New Haven Green. For those who knew her, Coconut was forever by her side. He is now in the care of her friend, Marcey Lynn Jones. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Elaine Peters had the spirit of dance inside of her. As a girl, she set the stage ablaze at the Bowen-Peters School of Dance, where her father and stepmother were the founders and she taught for years. In New York, she soared through work with the late Lavinia Williams and members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Back home, a spirited conga line seemed to follow her across the city, from the New Haven city bus to the city’s Caribbean Heritage Festival. Her chihuahua, Coconut, was often dancing along in her arms or at her feet.
Now, New Haven must carry on that rich legacy without her. Peters, a skilled dancer, drummer and visual artist who built community through the arts and for decades led New Haven’s Kwanzaa celebrations, died late last month at the age of 70. She is survived by her siblings, Jomo and Ntombi Peters, her daughter, Tulani Peters-Adger, and a host of friends who are feeling her loss acutely.
In New Haven, she leaves behind a community wracked by grief, from former dance sisters and peers at the New Haven Free Public Library to drummers who can’t imagine a healing circle without her. She was also an active and longtime member of New York’s East Coast Village, a retreat dedicated to Indigenous ancestral wisdom and helmed by the late Malidoma Somé.
“She had a personality where she just embraced life—she would just take you where she wanted to take you, you were just happy to be along for the ride,” recalled her younger brother, Jomo Peters, in a phone call last week. “She loved to celebrate, she celebrated love and life and togetherness. There was always a spark in her. I’ve never encountered anyone else who could do that. She could make any situation a celebration.”
Peters leads a conga line at the Caribbean Heritage Festival in 2021. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
“The question for me is, what’s this world gonna be like without Elaine?” said drummer Brian Jarawa Gray, who first met Peters in the early 1970s, when he arrived as a drummer at Bowen-Peters. “Everything that I've done, she was always part of that. She touched so many people. Some call her auntie, some call her sister, some people call her momma. There’s just so much that she did.”
While Peters was born in Boston, the story of her childhood begins in earnest on Dixwell Avenue, at the then-nascent Bowen-Peters Cultural Arts Center, in the 1960s. It was there, in 1963, that the late Kenneth and Angela Bowen Peters—her father and stepmother—founded a dance school with a few hundred dollars and a dream of bringing Black arts education to New Haven.
For an eight-year-old Peters, who had grown up watching her parents perform in Boston, participating wasn’t a choice. It was just the family business.
“I was in it before I knew I was in it, you know, because I was born into it,” she recalled in a 2021 Kulturaly LIT interview celebrating Kwanzaa (watch it here, or below). “I was born into it.”
Photo Contributed by Jomo Peters.
From the beginning, it instilled in her a deep love not only for dance and drumming, but also for mentorship, which she continued to do for the rest of her life in New Haven (less than a week before she passed, she was participating in a Kwanzaa celebration at City Hall). At Bowen-Peters, she quickly became one of the dancers that students looked up to, the cool older kid to New Haven culture-bearers like Diane Brown, IfeMichelle Gardin, and Shari Caldwell, as well as the late Chuckey Brown, Paul Hall and Aleta Staton. If a student passed through the school’s doors, they knew Elaine, and it was likely they loved her too.
“She was an amazing sister,” said former Bowen-Peters student Shari Caldwell, who went on to teach dance in New Haven for decades before moving to Maryland. “A beautiful, beautiful dancer. Her instrument was her body, and it was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Everybody has their ups and downs, and she went through a lot, but she was always thinking about how to contribute artistically and bring culture to the community.”
“Elaine was very creative,” remembered Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown, who met her when she was eight, and started classes at Bowen-Peters. “Not just dance. She loved African American culture, Caribbean culture, and she embraced it all and she taught it all, whenever she had an opportunity to teach.”
“There was a sisterhood there,” she added, remembering the sense of mentorship that she felt from Peters and peers like Lucretia Moye-Mack, whose son Brooklyn just returned to the Washington Ballet after years leading the Columbia Classical Ballet. “She was a big dance sister. They set the example for us on what a sisterhood was.”
When Peters wasn’t in the studio, she was working behind the scenes, doing some of the administrative work required of running a dance center (“All the envelopes!” she remembered with a small smile in a 2021 interview. “You had to lick and seal and send out things, [there were] no computers then.”). Through her parents’ guidance, she learned a kind of kindness, rigor and social grace, watching as they offered work in exchange for classes for students who could not afford tuition.
But it was on the dance floor, perfecting styles that ranged from advanced ballet and jazz to Afro-Cuban dance, that she shone most brightly. Peters excelled as a member of the school’s dance troupe, traveling to different places around the city to teach and to perform. Like her father, she became a skilled drummer, a talent that she carried with her for decades after the school had shut its doors. At some point, she became an assistant teacher to Bowen Peters, learning how to mentor under her stepmother’s watchful eye.
“She was one of the most powerful and beautiful dancers that you could ever see,” remembered Jomo Peters. “She could command a stage just by her presence there.”
She also had a vivacity that stood out to all those who knew her, whether it was in New York or New Haven or elsewhere. Jomo, who is roughly 14 years younger, recalled thinking of Peters as “one of the older people who helped raise me,” the cool big sister who was old enough that she felt almost like an adult. At Bowen-Peters, she was “a hell of an artist” who painted vivid drumskins, African masks, and sewed costumes at the drop of a hat (“I could make anything if you give me a piece of string and a button,” she later said).
Peters celebrating Gather New Haven in September 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Outside of the school, she brought that excitement to all she did, infusing everyday activities with a bright, vast ebullience. When she took her siblings out with her, “we would have a ball,” Jomo remembered fondly. She was his gateway to George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, his cool playmate at a nearby park with a large hill, where a running start from her friends could make him feel like he was flying.
In the mid-1970s, Peters had her first and only child, Tulani Peters-Adger, who now lives in Hamden and works in New Haven. Her childhood was filled with dancing, Peters-Adger remembered in a phone call: Peters would lift her up and spin her around, spending long hours with her at the school (“She said when I was born, I came out and did a port de bras,” she remembered with a little laugh).
While her childhood was sometimes difficult, Peters-Adger said, “I was brought up with a lot of love.” Peters insisted on the value of a strong education, and she took it to heart, learning about the world around her as she also watched her mother teach and mentor members of the community.
“She was so full of life, and she brought that energy everywhere she went,” Peters-Adger said. “She was a teacher. She loved teaching … she did so many different things with her life.”
Peters leads a conga line at The Body Factory's Kwanzaa celebration in 2022. Danielle Campbell File Photo.
Peters never lost her love for, or dedication to, dance and drumming in New Haven. In 1976 or 1977—her cousin and once-student, Tanya Peters, can't remember the exact date—she starred in the school's production of Lena, a collaboration with the musician George Howard that traveled around the state, making stops in its major cities.
"She just had this way about her, and everything she did was with the force and fierceness," said her cousin, Edith Peters (Tanya Peters is Edith's sister, remembering the vigor with which Peters later helped her daughter prep ritual objects for a wedding in Jamaica. "Everything she did, she said, 'I’m going to do this and it’s going to be done to perfection' ... she had more talent in her thumbnail than most people have in their whole body."
In the late 1970s, Peters went temporarily to New York, studying alongside the late Lavinia Williams and taking classes at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center School. Back in New Haven, she grew her cultural footprint, bringing dance to the old Dixwell Community “Q” House, community centers in the Hill and Fair Haven, and public schools.
It was an act of faith and precision and artistry: she once laughed remembering jumping into her trusty Dodge Dart and “doing 100 miles trying to go back and forth” on I-95 to make it work.
But she did, building up hundreds of devoted students along the way, and raising a daughter of her own in between. As Staton, who has since passed herself, said in 2021, “you taught whole communities to dance.” When Bowen-Peters closed in 1984, she dedicated her career to keeping the same spirit of Black arts education alive in the city.
“After the school closed, she did so much work in New Haven to carry the legacy on,” remembered her younger sister, Ntombi Peters, in a phone call last week. “A lot of people who felt just really close to her and mentored by her. She felt a sense of responsibility and a joy in sharing the culture, the music, the history.”
Sometimes that looked like spreading the joy of dance and dance education—but Peters also delighted in and practiced music, drumming, spoken word and a connection with ancestral African traditions. In the mid-1980s, several friends remembered, she helmed a performance set on the New Haven Green, in which she worked with Jarawa Gray to unite dance and drum in a joyful, cacophonous opening for the jazz performer Lionel Hampton. In a recording that Gray still has, her voice cuts through the buzz of conversation, introducing their act.
She held fast to that spirit of collaboration in all she did, Gray added. Beyond the Q House, where she taught hundreds of young dancers over the years, she partnered with the New Haven Free Public Library, “Free 2 Spit” open mic nights, New Haven People’s Center and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas to bring Black arts education to kids who weren’t always (or ever) getting it in the classroom. She was endlessly creative, building crafts and costumes out of what scraps she had at her disposal. If she saw a need in the community, she rose to meet it.
In the weeks since her passing, stories have come from friends across the city, from poets who loved to share the mic with her to those who danced as the B4 bus (now the 265) made its way downtown. When Delmance “Ras Mo” Moses became the community programs coordinator at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in the early 2000s, Peters worked with him to plan and stage the “All City Carnival,” teaching dance at the Farnam Neighborhood House on Fillmore Street. She helped build up Free 2 Spit, a spoken word community downtown that became more like family for anyone who was a regular. She brought her celebrated conga line to the New Haven Caribbean Festival, often becoming the life of the party in her signature Bajan blue, yellow, and black.
“She just literally opens up doors and provides opportunities for you to grow,” remembered Diamond Tree, who sits on the Community Kwanzaa Association of New Haven and vended with Peters at the New Haven Caribbean Heritage Festival. “And I will forever respect her, because people don’t do that. People don’t provide you the opportunities that can change your life.”
What was amazing, many friends added, was that she did it in the face of a world that was not always kind to her. During her life, Peters struggled with mental illness, homelessness, and food insecurity; she was a survivor of domestic violence who spoke out about being ignored and gaslit by the medical industry and denied the social services she may have needed most.
From City Hall to the state legislature, she became a fierce advocate for groups like the No More Crumbs Coalition and Mothers for Justice, sharing her own lived experiences so that others might not have to live through them.
Peters and Coconut with drummer Jesse Hameen and Judge Clifton Graves. Contributed Photo.
“I learned to compartmentalize and lock these emotions away, coping using multiple art forms and becoming an advocate for others, but I still have experienced a lifetime of post-traumatic stress symptoms,” she shared in a 2013 testimony addressed to the Connecticut General Assembly. “I recently have been helped to understand that to heal, I must unlock some of those memories, but the process is so very, very painful that I am often in a state of despair.”
“The things that come to mind are A-B-C-D,” said the Rev. Bonita Grubbs, who founded Mothers for Justice during her time at the helm of Christian Community Action. “She was an activist. She was also very much believing in the need for change, She was creative, and determined. And I’ll add an E. She was excellent in what she tried to do to make a difference. She engaged deeply.”
In the last 25 years of her life, Peters—and Coconut, who was forever at her side—continued to activate those around her, often the life of the party even as she slowed down. Concerned that the city’s young people were not learning about Kwanzaa in their schools, homes or neighborhoods, she began holding Kwanzaa celebrations at different branches of the New Haven Free Public Library, partnering with groups like Sisters With A New Attitude (S.W.A.N.A) and branch managers at the Mitchell, Wilson, and Stetson Branch Libraries across the city.
Around 2011, she founded the Community Kwanzaa Association of New Haven, through which she helped the city’s Black and Hispanic Caucus plan over a decade of Kwanzaa celebrations inside City Hall and helped libraries, community centers, small Black-owned businesses and classrooms get Kwanzaa off the ground if they needed an extra lift. Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Kim Edwards, who chairs the caucus, said she was devastated to learn of Peters’ death and would be finding a way to honor her service and legacy.
Peters at the New Haven Caribbean Heritage Festival in 2021. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
“She was a true light shining in our community,” Edwards said on Tuesday night. “Her presence and commitment to the arts is well known throughout our communities. She shows up everywhere, even when she is not on the program. She has blessed us as the Black & Hispanic Caucus for many, many years … She is always ready to talk about the African diaspora and teach what cosmology means.”
“I would like to thank her family, and especially her daughter Tulani, for sharing her mother with us as a city,” she added. “Her mom is at peace with the ancestors.”
Her role as the Community Kwanzaa Association’s founder was just one of the cultural hats she wore. When she heard that members of the Jamaican American Connection were launching a Caribbean Heritage Festival in 2010, she reached out to founder Karaine Smith-Holness to get involved, and stayed involved from that point on.
For her, it was a celebration: Ken Peters’ ancestral roots were in Barbados, and she was proud of her Bajan heritage. If there was a festival, she would be there—often leading the conga line. Until her mobility slowed down, she also brought history and stories of Barbados, offering stolen shell cosmology to anyone who lingered long enough to strike up a conversation.
It was during those years that she also met artist and activist Marcey Lynn Jones, who became a close friend and confidant. When the two first crossed paths on the New Haven Green 23 years ago, Peters was sitting at a picnic table, offering spiritual readings to passers-by. She caught Jones’ attention when she commented on her aura, and the two began talking. “I just sat there and we had a conversation about spirituality and the diaspora,” Jones said.
It was a conversation the two would have, in many different places and forms, again and again over the next two decades. Over the years, Jones said Peters helped her understand “that I was a leader,” and reminded her of it until Jones believed it herself. She is now a leader at Rock Tabernacle Ministries, a church that rises in red brick and a purple awning from Webster Street. Jones cherished their time together at East Coast Village, which became a spiritual home away from home for many years.
She also saw the light Peters put into the community. Peters was a natural teacher, she said—and there was perhaps nothing she enjoyed more. Around 2011, Jones helped her found the Community Kwanzaa Association of Greater New Haven, which she now plans to carry on and expand in Peters’ honor. Over 10 years later, she is working with movement artists Diamond Tree and Earl Ali-Randall to support multiple events around the holiday.
“This has been a very large loss for me. I don’t worry about people, places, and things—all I know is what she was to me, and no one will ever understand that,” Jones said on an episode of WNHH’s “Marcey Lynn, Once Again” (watch it here) celebrating Peters’ life. “At this point, she’s a lot healthier, and she’s dancing when she couldn’t dance.”
It is a feeling that many of her friends and family members echoed in interviews this and last week, remembering an Elaine Peters free of the pain that had slowed her down and stolen some of her faculties close to the end of her life. In a phone call last week, both of her siblings stressed a joy and verve with which she lived her life, often literally dancing through it.
“I think what I want people to know and carry on about her is just her joy,” Jomo Peters said. “She wanted to put light in the world.”
A celebration of Peters’ life will be held in March of this year at a date to be determined. A candlelight vigil is planned for Friday, January 17, at 4:30 p.m. at the first picnic table by Elm and Church Streets on the New Haven Green.