Dancers from New Haven Academy make the mineral galleries their own. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Tyra Geter and J’nel Negron knelt among towers of aquamarine, rhodochrosite and heliodor, taking in the low glow of the room. Beside them, Tara Vogt lowered herself to the ground, knees pressed gently to the carpet. The room fell to a hush, even young kids quiet for a rare moment. The musician Arlissa’s voice floated over a speaker, urgent and clear as a bell. Sweep it all underneath the rug / Doesn't mean the dirt won't come up, she sang. The dancers began to roll and rise, arms lifted to the ceiling.
We need a change, Arlissa insisted over the track, and the dancers bent down at the waist, arms extended to their full, wide wingspan. Some amazing grace.
That scene came to the Yale Peabody Museum on Monday afternoon, as the space hosted its beloved and annual MLK Day of Service and Celebration across the building’s three floors. As artists, activists, organizers and culture-bearers fanned out across the galleries, families filled all three floors of the museum, ready to learn about how New Haveners are making King’s vision of social, racial, and economic justice their own.
Nowhere, perhaps, was the day’s call to action delivered with as much grace and propulsion as in David Friend Hall, where dancers from New Haven Academy and Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy (BRADA) performed amongst millennia-old gem and rock formations from around the globe. Throughout, they worked to tie past to present to future through embodied practice, showing how the genius of Black culture lives on in some of New Haven’s youngest artists.
“To be able to give back in this way, there are no words,” said Carissa Kee, a lifelong New Havener who grew up visiting the Peabody, and now runs the dance program at New Haven Academy. “It’s a very surreal feeling, a priceless feeling. The love being poured into this day, this celebration of Martin Luther King … the dream lives on. I didn’t feel any negative energy in the room.”
Top: Diane Petaway, Pia Grasty, Caroline Baker and Rayna Walters. Bottom: Naomi, Eimani, George, Jaden, and Shauna Martin.
From the moment a person walked through the Peabody’s doors Monday, that sense of hope seemed to be everywhere, from the building’s main hall to zine making stations and community conversations in its program rooms. Beneath the old, soaring bones of a mosasaur, members of the Greater New Haven African American Historical Society (GNHAAHS) handed out information about the organization, inviting kids to a button-making station in one corner of the table. Every few minutes, a new handful of young people seemed to pop up, excited to watch the buttons take shape before their eyes.
“I love it,” said 7-year-old Jaden Martin, who was excited to color in a button design before watching it take shape.
At the other end of the table, GNHAAHS President Rayna Walters soaked in the scene as the hall grew crowded, and conversation rose and fell around her. The co-founder of Anti-Racism in Action, Inc. (ARIA), Walters said that she is excited for the year ahead. In the next months, she’s focused on growing the organization’s collaborations with groups like the Official Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven (JCGNH) to a new program for budding young archivists.
“I’m really passionate about bringing local history to life,” she said, beaming as 5-year-old Naomi Martin ran to the other end of the table to try her hand at button making, learned that the machine was on a brief break, and still walked away with an MLK-day themed design that she could color in herself.
“It’s so important for us to have these things in the community,” chimed in Naomi’s dad, George Martin. “They [the youth] will be able to learn the history of Dr. King and what he has done not only for African Americans, but for minorities as a whole.”
Those words resonated upstairs, as dancers arranged themselves amidst glass vitrines, shimmering cases and low, dramatic lighting on one side of the room. Around them, a crowd spilled beyond the rows of chairs set up for the performance, with standing room along both sides of the gallery. Closer to the crescent of carpet that had become a makeshift stage, kids sat shoulder to shoulder, cross-legged and fidgety as they waited for the action to begin.
It was there, looking over the space, that dancers took their place on the floor, making themselves still and mollusk-like for just a moment. Once they began moving, they didn’t stop for the next three minutes.
As the music began, swirling around the gallery, they tapped into different moments of dance history, from ballet and lyrical to modern and praise. A verse would start, Arlissa’s voice cracking as she asked for a kinder world, and dancers wrapped themselves in fleeting embraces, their arms drifting in and out again past their sides.
Damage can't be undone / Let's not pretend it disappears, she sang, and Geter and Vogt extended their arms back to the floor, their pointed feet slicing through the air as Negron spun behind them, arms sharply extended. As they began to orbit each other, spinning into blurs of color, arms and legs went airborne, dancers soaring even in the small, confined space. In the audience, someone let loose a spontaneous "Whooo!" and a chorus of praise from the crowd followed.
The song alone, in some ways, feels like the perfect choice for this moment. In 2018, “We Won’t Move” became popular after it was featured in the film adaptation of Angie Thomas' novel The Hate U Give, which tells the story of Black teenager pushed into organizing and activism after police murder of her friend during a traffic stop. Eight years later, the grief and longing at the edge of the singer’s voice still feels raw, as state-sanctioned violence grows its footprint across the country, including in New Haven.
Transformed anew for dance, it became a blueprint for a shared humanity, dancers leaving it all on the floor as they synchronized their movements, and then worked to literally lift each other up and transform into physical supports. So too later in the performance, when all four students took the stage for Beyonce’s 2003 “Crazy In Love” and Alright Slash’s “Otis/NOLA Bounce Remix” that had the crowd cheering, and made it hard not to dance right along.
“I wanted to celebrate hip-hop, which is major to our culture and to our people,” Kee later said, after performing a solo to Andra Day’s “Rise Up” that gave dancers a chance to catch their breath. Geter, a senior at the school who came up through Betsy Ross, agreed, letting herself savor the moment before finding a place to watch Betsy Ross students coming to the stage.
“Being able to dance shows the good that can happen,” particularly as artists honor King’s life and legacy, she said.
“It shows barriers that have been broken,” chimed in Vogt, a freshman at New Haven Academy who also danced at Betsy Ross. “I’m grateful to be able to dance in the way that I do with the people that I do.”
BRADA students take the floor.
That momentum, paired with a fierce call to summon and protect Black joy, flowed through BRADA’s performance in the same galleries, first as dancers glided out to Kirk Franklin’s “My World Needs You” and later during a Michael Jackson-Kendrick mashup that had the audience talking back to the dancers. In the first, a lyrical number that invokes worship and praise, dancers harnessed the weight of the world around them, searching for something intangible as they ran, leapt, reached and spun through the space.
At one moment, they lifted their arms skyward, as though the force of the dance alone might extend past the ceiling and roof above, and reach right to the heavens. At another, they pulled their arms to their chests and then reached back out towards the audience, a reminder that we are all each other’s keepers. Even in the seconds-long pauses, their bodies forming tableaus against the mineral and rock formations, they seemed to be moving towards a more graceful present, because the world depended on it.
By the time dancers returned to the front of the room, marching around a quartz and sandstone concretion that looked otherworldly, the audience could feel that in every movement, the air electric. Somewhere, “They Don’t Really Care About Us” began to play with persistent, hammering percussion, and dancers moved toward the audience, some of them fighting back smiles and others serious, almost pugnacious. They jogged in place, bare feet hitting the ground in time with the music.
When they looked up, arms at their sides, and let out a piercing and collective scream, it was a release—for the past two weeks, for the past five years, for childhoods upended by violence at home and abroad, for educators who will never be paid enough in a chronically underfunded school system. Jackson sang over the track, a crisp and metallic edge to his voice, and dancers kept moving, legs bending one second, and supporting backbends and breakdancing in the next.
“Come on girls!” one parent yelled from the front row. Back at the center of the room, a flurry of movement slowed for a moment, as freshman Jaylynne Diaz leapt out onto the carpet. Rocking a shock of pink hair, she locked eyes with the audience, covered her mouth and bent backwards, as though her limbs were suddenly pliable. Around her, fellow dancers’ legs and arms snapped back to attention, bodies springing forward through the space.
But it was perhaps what came next that most fit the spirit of the day. As “They Don’t Really Care About Us” faded, dancers—now laying on the floor, where they had finished the song—took a beat for applause, and then rose with their fists held high, triumphant. As Kendrick’s “We Gon’ Be Alright” filled the space, they began to bounce, eyes bright and faces beaming. It was a reminder that their joy was present and contagious, there even in a world turned totally upside down. It had to be.
“To honor him [King] is an honor itself,” Claxton said after the performance, as dancers headed to the basement to eat lunch. As a veteran educator who went through the New Haven Public Schools herself, she knows that her students are paying attention to current events, and encourages them to use the power of the arts to tap into their feelings, and spread hope on and off the dance floor. "Especially the times when it feels like you’re going backwards.”