Ailey II Gets BRADA Moving

Top: Tatum Cannon, an eighth grader at the school. Bottom: Jaylynne Diaz, who has not danced since June because of the high school's new curriculum. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

Drumbeats rolled through the second floor of Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy, weaving in and out of Nikki Claxton’s dance classroom. Across the floor, students spread out, making their limbs pliable as they reached up, then extended their feet to an open second position. In the center of the room, Shay Bland made her way over to eighth grader Tatum Cannon, and watched every movement. 

“How tall can you make yourself?" she asked, and Tatum lengthened, her arms stretched out toward the ceiling. Her legs, already nimble and full of quiet force, somehow pushed deeper into the floorboards. The drums wrapped themselves around everything. Bland smiled. “I see an Ailey dancer.” 

Friday morning, Bland, with fellow Ailey II dancers Carley Brooks and Darion Turner, brought an hour of rigorous technique and choreography to BRADA, for a masterclass before the company’s Saturday night performance at the Shubert Theatre. Working with dancers from sixth to ninth grade, the trio gave an astounding lesson in not just dance, but what it means to show up as one’s full artistic self, even and especially in a world turned on its head. 

It is the first time in years that an outside dance program has come to BRADA, which until June was known as Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS). This year, it also comes as BRADA transforms into an arts middle and high school.

Shay Bland, who is Ailey II's rehearsal director. 

“It’s where we all started, and it reminds us of where we started,” said Bland, who was a student at New York’s Professional Performing Arts School (PPAS) long before she was ever a member of Ailey II, where she’s now the company’s rehearsal director. “It is wildly important to see people in the same space that look like you, sound like you, use the same language that you do.” 

And throughout Friday’s class, it was. Just before 9 a.m., dancers rolled in, some still shaking the sleep from their eyes as others looked ready to spring into action (“It’s early morning,” said Turner, whose day usually starts and ends later than a middle schooler’s). Around them, Claxton’s classroom was already a case study in dance education, the walls teeming with notes on technique, terminology, and bright posters from years of previous performances. 

An image of the late Judith Jamison, who joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in 1965 and led it from 1989 to 2011, looked out from the far wall. As if on her cue, students fanned out across the floor, ready for warmups. Bland, who is also the assistant choreographer on the jukebox Broadway Musical Hell’s Kitchen, looked over the class, cued up the music, and then jumped right in. Pressed up close to the wall-length mirrors, Brooks and Turner swiveled forward, and began to move.

Top: Eighth grader Kimberly Gardner. Bottom: Shay Bland works with sixth grader Gabriella Moore.

In the room, the effect was immediate. Dancers stretched towards the rafters, their arms at an angle as they leaned forward, bodies almost frozen in space. Over a dozen backs arched and then relaxed into tall C shapes, spines longer than they’d seemed just minutes before. Students reached forward, chests and torsos opening up as arms stretched toward the front of the room. Soon, outstretched palms hovered in the air, fingers pressed tightly together and waiting for the next direction.

“Don’t worry about making mistakes because that’s how you learn,” said Bland, directing the group to a natural second. The term—which both folds in and works outside of ballet’s formal vocabulary—is a nod to the Horton Technique, which is named after twentieth-century choreographer Lester Horton. 

The technique centers 17 “fortifications” that are meant to help lengthen, recenter and strengthen dancers’ movements, a nod to the Native and non-Western movement practices that inspired Horton during his lifetime. 

Claxton, whose own time in Ailey’s summer intensive transformed how she understood dance when she was still a student, beamed from the far corner of the room, taking out a phone to record. For weeks before the class, she taught students the fundamentals of Horton, introducing them to a form she wished she’d learned earlier. “I’m just happy they can see dance beyond school,” she later said. “They get to see dance that looks like them.”

Top: Ailey II dancer Carley Brooks demonstrates choreography. 

Bland, walking through the rows, stopped at Tatum, studying the young dancer. “Open Egyptian,” she called, and students opened their arms, bent them towards the sky, and rotated their bodies ever so slightly. Tatum, who for years has danced for years at Tia Russell Arts Center (TRAC), leaned into the position until every muscle seemed to be temporarily in its hold. 

“I liked that they broke it down for us,” Tatum later said. “When I’m learning a new warmup, I really try my best.”

The class, meanwhile, began to pass by in a blur, from pendulum-like release swings to synthy strings and electronic dance music that wrapped the students in their sound from a speaker at one side of the room. To Cashmere Cat’s earwormy “Mirror Maru,” dancers swung back and forth, their shoulders becoming loose, arms unstuck and fluid. They hugged themselves, arms releasing just as quickly as they swayed. Beneath them, Bland’s voice became a steady soundtrack—“Passé!” A beat. “Fall!” —over the pauses in the undulating strings. 

At the front of the room, seventh grader Oni David went from a passé into a high lunge, her arms gliding through the air as they reached for the far walls on either side of the room. When she’d completed one movement she turned, arms extended in a V around her head.

“Look over there!” Bland called, and heads swiveled to the left all at once, eyes trained on the fabric that fell classically around Jamison’s raised right leg. “It’s just good seeing dancers [who look] like you,” Oni later said, reflecting on the class. 

And it was. At each new direction, Bland struck a balance between copacetic (“Just be! Cool?”), firm but gentle (“May I touch your body?” she asked before gently correcting dancers’ positions), and relatable (“I’m thinking, if I could, my heel is trying to escape, but my toe catches me.”). Flanking her on either side, Brooks and Turner jumped in, guiding students through increasingly difficult choreography before the class was over. 

Darion Turner. 

“Shall we torture them?” Bland asked Turner at one point, before introducing a punishing flurry of passés and ​​dégagés that seemed to come one right after the other. Soon, the room was filled with the sound of fast footfalls, some students doing jumping jacks as penance when they inevitably missed a step. That method is a time-honored tradition at Ailey II: “It’s not a punishment. It’s to make fun of yourself if you mess up,” Bland said. 

For some of the students, the class was not just rigorous, but also revelatory. When she took her final bow as a middle schooler in June, now-freshman Jaylynne Diaz didn’t know that it meant she wouldn’t be dancing again until October of her freshman year. But as BRADA rolls out its high school model, freshmen don’t have the chance to dance as part of the curriculum. 

Claxton, who taught Diaz through middle school, pulled her into the master class because she knows how important dance is for her wellbeing. 

Diaz, who had started the Ailey II class feeling a jumble of nerves, seemed to ease into the movements. As students practiced moving their bodies back and forth, she loosened up, breath becoming steady. She felt the floor beneath her feet. By the time she had started to make her way across the floor, leaning forward onto one leg, her breath had evened out.

“When I came in, this felt so hard, there was stuff that I’d never done before,” she said. Still, she stuck with it: she had never given up one of Claxton’s courses, and Friday wasn’t the moment she was going to start. 

Kimberly Gardner, who is in the eighth grade, said she felt rejuvenated by the class. As a student at Tia Russell Arts Center, she’s used to seeing other Black dancers, and having teachers who look like her. But Friday, she still soaked in every moment, aware of how rare and sacred those affinity spaces can be. 

“It’s amazing,” she said. “I’m just so glad the culture is spreading.” 

Nowhere, perhaps, was that clearer than in the final bit of choreography, as students mastered a routine, and then swept across the floor, making it their own. Where there had been long, lengthened limbs and holds and extensions in which the seconds seemed to slow, everything moved more quickly, as if dancers’ feet had wings. They traveled so quickly that it appeared they were gliding. They folded in arms and shoulders, making a seconds-long bob their own. They did a ​​Pas de Bourrée that went right into a balletic kind of two step.

Bland, just as she had for the entire class, watched dancers carefully, taking mental notes.  “Okay braids!” she called out at one point, and a student’s blush was nearly palpable across the room. “Mmm!” she offered at another, as sixth grader Gabriella Moore stepped forward, and mastered a movement for the first time. When the group finished, she praised students for a job well done. 

“Don’t be afraid to be wrong!” she said. “I see some personality. That’s what we like. That’s what makes an Ailey dancer.”

She eyed London Brockington, a sixth grader at the school who has danced since the time she could walk. London, standing beside Oni, smiled bashfully, then met Bland’s gaze. “Who are you?” Bland asked. London answered quietly, and then repeated her name loud enough for the room to hear. “I want to know who you are.” 

As students left the classroom to change into their school clothes, Claxton said she was grateful for the opportunity to be with company members before the performance—and to attend the performance itself. Often, it’s high schools like Co-Op, where students also study dance, that get these types of opportunities. So she was thrilled when BRADA worked with the Shubert to secure a block of tickets for kids. 

As a kid, she didn’t know there were Black ballerinas (and wasn't taught about them in New Haven's schools) until her own teacher, Horton master Christine Kershaw, took students to a Black dance convention in Philadelphia (Kershaw is still teaching, at both Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and the Elements Dance & Movement Conservatory). 

“I saw [Mikhail] Baryshnikov,” but she assumed ballet wasn’t for her, Claxton said. She struggled with the form until she studied at the Ailey School’s summer extension, and realized how essential it was to the practice of dance. She wants her students to know that there are no limits to the work that they can pursue (that seems especially timely this week, as Misty Copeland takes her final bow with the American Ballet Theatre). 

“It’s so important for them to see Black people who have the technique,” she said. Ailey II, she added, was perfect in that sense: the company blends elements of ballet, Horton, modern hip-hop and West African in what it does/ “I want them to know, they were just like you once.” 

From The Studio To The Shubert

Top: Ailey II in Rena Butler's "In Session." Nir Arieli Photo. Bottom: BRADA students at the Shubert. Jayla Anderson Photo.

On Saturday, students had the opportunity to view Brooks and Turner (and the rest of the company) in action, as Ailey II graced the Shubert’s stage with four pieces that stretched over two acts. All works except one—Jamison’s 1984 “Divining,” of which Turner performed a solo excerpt—were choreographed this year. 

That’s part of the company’s mission: to honor the legacy of its founder Alvin Ailey, who died at just 58 years old of complications from AIDS, while also dreaming into the future. The other three works included “Berry Dreamin,” set to the music of the late Chuck Berry and choreographed by Chalvar Monteiro; “Likes Vs. Life,” choreographed by Renee McDonald; and Rena Butler’s “In Session,” set to music by Darryl J. Hoffman and performed by the entire company. 

“I found it inspiring to see dancers that are skin-toned like me being able to showcase a lot of different things like personality and skill,” said BRADA seventh grader Kamren Robinson after the show. While “I was nervous for the [Friday] workshop because I didn’t know what they were going to show us or teach us,” he came into Saturday’s performance feeling excited to see dancers do their thing.

Throughout, students were awed into stunned silences and even louder applause by what they saw. During “In Session,” Hoffman’s score wove schoolhouse bells and classroom sounds with various songs by Doechii, highlighting the relative youth of the Ailey II company. The piece began with dancers shifting through organized formations, mimicking student and teacher dynamics. 

By the end of the piece, however, “students” had evolved, breaking out of traditional student roles. Each dancer in the company of 12 had a moment to dance solo as their castmates stood scattered across the stage and watched. Deep dips, a nod to Ballroom history, turns, and jumps erupted on the stage, pulling attention from one dancer to the next, each bringing their personality to the movement.  BRADA students watched, clocking the choreography and  improvisations in real time. 

In a Q&A with cast members after the show, Shubert Director of Education & Engagement Kelly Wuzzardo asked all young male dancers in the audience to raise their hands. Robinson was among the only students to raise his hand, and Wuzzardo noted the potential futures of male dancers through the examples demonstrated onstage by Ailey II dancers. 

Several students also reflected on how experiencing the masterclass translated to watching the performance itself. Destiny Trimble, who is in the seventh grade, remembered how she and her classmates took space during the class to put their own spin on movements, like arms during the release swings. 

“I thought I was going to be nervous, but I really wasn’t because they made the workshop in a way that we could understand,” Destiny said. “The teaching style was different, so I think it was good that Miss Nikki gave us two or three weeks to practice Horton because that was the main style that they taught during warmup.”

“They showed that there is a lot of diversity in the dance community,” she added. “Everybody looks different, and they have different movement qualities. I learned that you can add your own personality to dancing because there was a lot of personality and diversity in the show."