Betsy Ross Students Dance Their Humanity

Top: Eighth grade students in "Imagine Me," choreographed by teacher Nikki Claxton. Bottom: Fifth grade students in "When You Believe," also choreographed by Claxton. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

The soft piano and percussion of Kirk Franklin's "Imagine Me" echoed through the auditorium, bringing the audience to a hush. On stage, dancers stood frozen for a moment, sheafs of light falling over them. At the front of the group, Jahzaria White crossed her arms over her chest, bowing her head as if she was in prayer.

Behind her, a slideshow began to play. There were pictures of parents smiling on porches and in doorways, their arms outstretched to their children. There were older siblings and grown dancers, soaring through the air. When it got to her mom, the late Latoya Glasper, Jahzaria could feel her presence in every step she took. 

It was just one of the ways students embraced their identity through dance last week, as Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) held an encore performance of its annual dance showcase for students and staff. For over an hour, fifth through eighth graders taught a masterclass in empathy, guiding the audience through all the grief, fear, experiment, trial and celebration that a single school year can hold.    

A time for celebration: Students in "Brand New Day" and "Celebration," both choreographed by Nikki Claxton. 

For the first time in the school’s history, alumni also returned for and choreographed works in the showcase. The performance also marked the dedication of the auditorium in honor of Sylvia "Ms. Pett" Pettricione, a veteran educator in the New Haven Public Schools system who worked at BRAMS for 23 years. Arts Director Tavares Bussey now fills her shoes.

“The growth we see, it always amazes me,” said Nikki Claxton, who teaches dance alongside Hannah Healey. She pressed a hand to her heart. “They put in so much work.”

As the showcase began last Tuesday, it was Healey’s sixth and seventh grade dancers who set the tone. To ear-shattering cheers, Michael Jackson's "Heal The World” flowed through the speakers as dancers knelt on the stage. For a moment, their shoulders and foreheads kissed the cool wood, the audience waiting for their first move.

As his voice entered the fray—There's a place in your heart/And I know that it is love!—they rose, fluttering up and down in time with the music. They rose again, raising their arms toward the sky. A beat, and the arms were at their full wingspan. Jackson’s vocals lifted on the chorus—Heal the world! Make it a better place!—and students crouched to the side, arms lifting, and traveled across the stage with the words.

Healey joked after the performance that she loves both house music and a good instrumental beat: students built on that in "The Singularity" (bottom), danced by her eighth graders.  

At the front, seventh grader Tara Vogt took a moment in the spotlight. As classmates knelt behind her, she raised a leg in the air, holding her foot as cheers erupted from the audience. Another student joined in, their costumes glowing seafoam green. With no words at all, the two communicated across the distance, their limbs doing all the talking.

“When we perform, we can teach other people,” said Tara, who started dancing as a small kid, in an interview after the performance. As a dancer both in and outside of school, she added that the practice teaches her to focus on caring for her mind and body. She currently trains six of seven days per week.“This performance felt great.”

Back in the auditorium, it was as if students had stepped through an emotional portal. In a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” also performed at Winterfest last year, dancers moved through a meditation on global conflict and genocide, limbs ablaze as a slideshow of war and of struggle played behind them. In one moment, it was July 1964, and two Black girls locked arms, running from police as their mouths twisted into terrified O shapes. In another, the slide stopped on a blown-out building in Gaza, destruction everywhere in its path.

Top: Seventh grade students in Nikki Claxton's "The Impossible Dream," which they first performed as an ode to Black dance and dancers during Black History Month. Bottom: Students in "Give A Little Kindness."

On stage, Maegiani Davenport lifted her shoulders toward the ceiling and began to spin, her feet carrying her across the expanse. As plumes of smoke billowed over a city, dancers flipped their bodies into triangles, lifting one leg overhead before lowering themselves to the stage, and pressing their cheeks flat to the wood. For just a moment, they rested there, taking a breath, then they were on the move once more.

Claxton, who has never shied away from social justice in her work, later explained that students had a hand in the dance. Whileshe choreographed the number, they each researched a global conflict, from the echos of colonialism and genocide in Rwanda to white nationalism at home from the 1950s through today. As they moved, the message was one of both exhaustion and hope: that there is another way to solve conflict, because there has to be. So too in “Give A Little Kindness,” a sendoff for Healey’s eighth graders set against a dark pink background.

By Franklin's "Imagine Me" just two songs later, a sense of healing crackled and buzzed through the air. Moving in time with a slideshow, dancers lifted their torsos upwards, arms raised as their backs bent back in gentle C and S shapes. Behind them, photographs began to light up the screen, as if Claxton had turned on a carousel of film stills.

A mom smiled behind her thick-rimmed glasses, eyes locked with the viewer. A grandmother, her ponytail tucked behind her shoulder, half-grinned with tired eyes. The late Sharon Clemons looked out of the photograph, and a few people in the audience audibly caught their breath.

Students in "Imagine Me." Jahzaria White is at the center in the top photo.

As they moved, the slideshow shifted to the inside of Claxton's upstairs dance studio, where bright posters on technique and terminology line the walls. As Franklin spoke over the track—This song is dedicated to people like me/Those that struggle with insecurities—the frame shifted to students' skin, on which they had written their own insecurities in thick paint. Across the images, students named everything from body dysmorphia to fear of failure.

"We talked about never being ashamed of who you are and we learned things about each other," Claxton explained, adding that she was and remains floored by her students' vulnerability. When they started the exercise months ago, there were insecurities no one student could have guessed about another. “I want them to be confident in who they are.”

Back on screen, students began to rub the words from their skin, the ink smudging as they moved through their own hangups. On stage, they came together, supporting each other as if to say, I got you and you got this. The whole time, White somehow kept her eyes on both her classmates and the audience. As she moved, she thought of her mom, a city employee and dedicated matriarch who died suddenly two years ago in the midst of planning a public health fair.

"I just miss her," she said. When White was little, it was her mother who encouraged her to start taking lessons, which she did at four. At recitals, it was always Glasper who was her biggest cheerleader. "Dancing helps me remember and honor my mom."

Top: Eighth grade students in "The Singularity," choreographed by teacher Hannah Healey. Bottom: Seventh graders in "Ashes," also choreographed by teacher Hannah Healey.

At other points, students probed the dark depths of instinct, anxiety and depression. In "The Singularity," based on Ray Kurzweil's eponymous novel, Healey's students explored what it might look like for AI to take over humankind, their movements suddenly becoming precise and robotic. Just one number later, Claxton's fifth through eighth grade students and alumni unleashed something primeval in "Billie," set to Billie Eilish's "bury a friend."

But nowhere was it clearer than "How to Never Stop Being Sad,” choreographed by BRAMS alum Dakarai Langley. Now a rising sophomore at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, Langley built the dance for select fifth through eighth graders in both Claxton and Healey's classes, who rarely get to dance together despite studio spaces that share a door and dressing room.

After first hearing the song from the artist dandelion hands (Nick Heck) "when I was in a really dark place" a year ago, Langley couldn't put it out of his mind. The lo-fi sound, over which Heck recorded his own thoughts on depression, seemed like the right piece for a group of students who were navigating a new normal, including struggles with their mental health that social media and pandemic-era learning delays have exacerbated. So he gathered advanced dancers across several classes, bringing them together for just a few minutes on stage.

Top: Seventh grade students in "Black and Gold," choreographed by Nikki Claxton. Bottom: Students in "Sugar, Butter, Flour," choreographed by teacher Hannah Healey. 

"This is a very serious piece," he said before dancers swept out onto the stage. As Heck spoke over the track, dancers gravitated toward each other, some holding their skulls as others shuddered and shook at the shoulders. They half-jogged into a circle, some rolling on the floor as others lifted their limbs to the ceiling beams, and then out to the sides.

They came together, arms supporting each other as a student lifted themselves up, then draped themselves over the group in a kind of trust fall. They scattered, bodies contracting and expanding into solo and ensemble vignettes. Students moved together, crying out audibly just short of halfway through the piece.

"You don't need other people to drive away your loneliness," dandelion hands said over the speaker. "You just needed to find a way to talk to it." Students rolled on the stage, stood, then stepped quickly back, as if pulled by a giant magnet. They gathered into a knot, limbs extending out to form freeze-frame tableaus in time with the words "self self self," repeating like a mantra. They moved around each other, increasingly more frantic.

Without hesitation, Maegiani Davenport leapt off the stage and began to run toward the audience, stopping short of the front row. Her face, leaning back to catch the light, was etched with terror. She grabbed the railing by the stage, as if she was hanging on for dear life. On stage, students collapsed into the floor. The auditorium went black, then exploded into cheering and applause.

"When I choreograph, it makes me feel like the leader that my inner child wanted to be, but never got to," Langley said afterwards. As a kid, "I never had the courage" to lead. That's changing now, through his work in the arts.

"You're welcome back at BRAMS anytime," said Arts Director Tavares Bussey following the performance. "We love you here."

Top: Nikki Claxton and Hannah Healey. Bottom: Students in "Brighter Days."

Both Claxton and Healey—and several of their students and alumni—also noted the sheer importance of joy in the showcase, proof positive that all of them made it through this year. In "Brighter Days," choreographed for Healey's sixth graders, students appeared onstage in bright dresses, ready to move both in unison and in their own time.

By "Celebration," set to Shakira's "Waka Waka," Claxton's eighth graders flowed into West African dance, gathering height as they folded in millenia-old elements from Ghana and Mali. Even "Sugar, Butter, Flour" lifted the mundane into the extraordinary, as a group of sixth through eighth graders worked with props and set pieces for the first time.   

It was fitting, then, that students ended on "Brand New Day," a piece from 2020 that Claxton brought back in a tribute to both her current students and many of her alumni. Four years ago, her students—particularly her graduating eighth graders—didn't get a dance showcase. Instead, teachers and students were just trying to survive the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, including a pivot to remote learning that lasted for over a year.

In the piece, students came onstage in tie-dye shirts, filling the space from end to end, leaving it only for a soaring solo from Langley. As they moved, the stage burst into bright color, and it felt like the closest thing to a party they’d experienced all day. Fellow alumni who joined in on the piece included Jaidyn Clarke-Broady, Dyani Dolberry, Tyra Geter and J'Nel Negron.    

For eighth grader Brelande Benoit, it was the right sendoff to eighth graders studying under both teachers, who will greet the unknown of high school in the fall. Before fifth grade, she hadn't danced seriously, she said. Now, she can't imagine her life without it

"Dance just has a feeling to it," she said. "It's a way to express your emotions."

For more from the performance, click on the videos above.