Students in "Purpose," which Nikki Claxton also called a "Ode To BRAMS." Lucy Gellman Photos.
A single voice boomed through the auditorium, cutting through the darkness as it wrapped the audience in its sound. Remember, dance is more than just movement, it declared, and rows of dancers bowed their heads. It’s a way of expressing your truest self. A tear fell, and then another, and then another. Wherever life takes you, I hope you keep dancing.
In the front row, dancers Jaylynne Diaz and Timyra Rogers locked eyes, their chests heaving. Rogers bit her bottom lip and scrunched up her face. Diaz pulled a hand to her cheek, refocused, and began to roll down from her back, doing a deep plié into the stage. A photo of the class, all smiles, appeared on a projector behind them.
In four years, they’d taken hundreds of steps together here. These, at least for now, would be the last.
It’s just one of the ways that Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) tapped into a divine, liminal, and at times transformative space Friday night, as students presented their end-of-year dance showcase in the newly-baptized Sylvia Petriccione Auditorium. Held on the cusp of multiple transitions—eighth grade graduation, the introduction of a new arts high school, and potential cuts to arts educators across the district—the night wove movement into majesty, giving students a chance to harness their power and fête the teachers on whose shoulders they stand.
It also marked the final dance performance before BRAMS becomes Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy, or BRADA, in the fall of this year—a transition about which the city’s Board of Education has remained fairly tight-lipped. The auditorium is named after former arts educator Sylvia “Ms. Pet” Petriccione, who worked in the New Haven Public Schools for almost four decades before retiring in 2022.
“It feels very emotional and overwhelming,” said Diaz, who plans to continue on to BRADA next year, one of the only eighth graders at the school to do so. “We’re the last graduating eighth grade class before it becomes a high school. We just gotta put it all on the stage.”
And from the beginning of the night to the end of it, they did, turning the performance into a kind of prayer. As students scurried between two second-floor dance studios before the show, many practiced their choreography one last time, pausing in the wall-length mirrors as they lifted arms, pointed feet, did leg raises and arched their backs to the ceiling. Every so often, someone emerged in a jumble of tulle and sequins, and conversation would fall to a hush, then resume seconds later.
As he stretched out in Nikki Claxton’s classroom, sixth grader Kamren Robinson said he was excited for the showcase, because dance—which he’s wanted to do since he was little—has helped him overcome stage fright, and become more confident both in and beyond the classroom. When he dances, “I feel happy,” he said. “I feel like myself.” Less than half an hour later, that was fully on display, as he glided into Kirk Franklin’s “Lean On Me” and did a backbend, watching the audience as he lowered his shoulders toward the stage, and the house exploded in applause.
Back in the classroom, the haunting strains of Tommee Profitt’s “Sound of War” drifted through the air, dramatic and heart-pounding when the beat dropped. Listening meditatively, sixth grader Ralani Moody lifted her leg close to her ear, and held it there for a moment. Across the room, Diaz and Rogers gathered with fellow eighth graders, savoring the moment. In two weeks, all of them will be headed to different high schools across New Haven, West Haven and Hamden.
When they started together in the fifth grade, “it was hard,” Diaz remembered. The school was just coming back from Covid-19, and teachers and students were navigating a new normal together. In the dance studio, tape marked the spots where students were supposed to stand, maintaining social distance as they eased back to in-person learning. Everyone was still masking, which could feel difficult after a routine left dancers taking in extra air.
And yet, it was also where so many students found community. While Rogers was briefly enrolled at a studio before middle school, she got most of her dance education at BRAMS, and has turned to it many times as a form of both expression and release. “All the stress that’s built up inside me, it just goes,” she said.
Friday night felt bittersweet, she added: she doesn’t know the next time she’ll dance with a group of classmates like this, and she doesn’t have the bandwidth for classes outside of school right now. West Haven High School, where she is headed, doesn’t have a dance program.
“We’re all going our separate ways,” she said wistfully. When asked who she’d be dancing for that night, she didn’t hesitate. “Ms. Nikki,” she answered with the question still hanging in the air.
“It’s not going to be the same without all of my girls,” Diaz added of BRADA. Not even half an hour later, she was dancing that reality with her whole body, from “Becoming: A Journey of Grace” to a striking Black History Month mash up with Michael Jackson and Kendrick Lamar. Tonight, “I’m dancing for Ms. Nikki, to make her proud of us.”
Claxton, an alum of BRAMS and James Hillhouse High School who has been at the school for 29 years, said that she can feel that shift too. As BRAMS becomes BRADA, it will drop its fifth grade classes, then sixth grade a year later, then ultimately make the transition to a seventh- through twelfth-grade school. For her, there’s a loss there.
“I came to realize that you just have to take it each day at a time,” she said. Claxton pushes her students to find and test the edges of what they thought was physically possible, and consistently they have. “I love that I was able to work with fifth graders, because they’re not afraid. Now, the challenge will be doing that with seventh graders.”
Next door, dance teacher Hannah Healey buzzed between students, fielding last-minute questions as her young charges stretched out, compared notes and ran bits of choreography. Despite the thick, balmy June air inside the school—the power had gone out earlier in the day—several were already dressed in checkered holiday pajamas, ready for a propulsive sixth and seventh grade number set to music from the “Polar Express.”
“I think with the change to BRADA, my question is, how do we keep the traditions and the culture alive?” Healey said, as fifth graders prepared for their big debut in “How Does A Moment Last Forever?” Like Claxton, she attended BRAMS, graduating in 2005 before doing dance at Co-Op High School. As the school transitions, she’s focusing on the needs of her students.
Before the showcase, she’d programmed numbers that leaned into the bigness of change, including a sixth grade take on “The Climb” meant to recognize all that students were facing as they made it through middle school.
That was still true as students circled up and joined hands, ready for pep talks before heading onto the stage. As Healey bowed her head and thanked both students and their families—“I wouldn’t be here without your hard work, please remember that”—Claxton did the same, welcoming the spirit of something into the room.
Before they had broken the circle, eighth grader Anthonique Miller took over, her eyes squeezed shut as an expression of calm came over her face.
“Let us dance like David, heavenly father, because you know what dancing means to us these days,” she said as she led an impromptu prayer. When she finished, her fellow students shouted back an equally impromptu “Amen!”
It set the stage—literally—for a night of sublime reflections on movement, power, shared space and social justice that has long been part of the department. As hundreds of parents filled the auditorium, students made their way downstairs, waiting in the wings and the hallway outside the theater.
As the lights came up, Healey’s eighth graders filed in, some curled on the stage as others moved through the background slowly, as if they were finding their way through the wintery mess.
Behind them, neat text glowed against the image of an empty street, its businesses closed and blanketed in snow. Sepia drenched the shot, covering dancers in its yellow-orange hue. Forty to 60 percent of people experiencing homelessness are unemployed, the screen read. In front of it, bodies began to move, transforming the stage into a winter landscape.
Moving slowly, wordlessly, students tapped into their humanity, some lifting signs that urged kindness as others laid themselves across the stage, exhausted by the weight of the world. The words changed, noting that two years ago, 653,104 individuals reported experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. On a chair at stage left, Tarra Vogt reached out her left arm, the fingertips spread to their full width as she raised her left leg and leaned forward.
Around her, classmates extended their arms on the stage, as though they were trying to find a place to sleep for the night. When they rose, they lifted their arms toward each other, forming a sort of phalanx. At the front of the group, Emiya Johnson placed her hands over her heart, and looked down toward the stage. It was a reminder, if the audience needed it, that we could all extend each other a little more grace.
“Dance teaches us a lot of confidence,” Johnson had said before the performance. “To be more open to people, to be more creative.”
So too in “Becoming: A Journey of Grace,” set to Kirk Franklin’s “I Am” against a backdrop of sun-kissed clouds and blue sky. Bathed in the light of the screen, dancers moved slowly in and out of freeze frames, creating a series of tableaus until they began to feel the music, and melted right into it. As the lyrics swirled around them, they broke from their rows, lowering themselves to the floor then lifting their carriages, arms gliding through the air.
I am so far from perfect! I thought life is worthless! A choir belted from the speakers, and breaking from their lines, dancers took flight. Close to the lip of the stage, fifth grader Londyn Brockington soared forward, mirroring a classmate beside her. She sank back into the stage, her body a backwards C shape before she went into a full split in profile. Then she got right back up, and kept moving.
During warmups in Claxton’s classroom earlier that evening, she said that the year—her first at BRAMS—had helped her get in touch with her emotions. While dance is and has long been most of her life, she said, there’s something specific about the learning that happens in Claxton’s classroom, as the beloved educator both pushes and affirms her students in every movement, every pep talk, every showcase.
Throughout, students made space for that kind of joy and justice, showing how dance can be both a teaching tool and a space for unbridled, sometimes even giddy delight. In one instance, Aloe Blacc’s “Shine” became a history lesson, paying tribute to figures like A. Phillip Randolph, Chris Smalls, Bayard Rustin, and Maida Kemp who have changed and are changing Black labor history. In another, students pulled umbrellas and jazz moves out for Doechii's “Anxiety,” riffing on a TikTok trend and homage to the 1990s, from Will Smith to the handheld Walkman.
In another still, they jumped into dazzling movement, with a show-stopping number to The Greatest Showman’s “Come Alive,” complete with BRAMS alumni and live juggling (a nod to seventh grader Ella Cebik, who managed to bring circus to her choreography). Even a fifth through eighth grade call to climate justice, set to Michael Jackson’s “Earth,” ended with students holding up an imaginary globe, a reminder that hope is still possible, if people choose to will it.
But nowhere was it clearer than in Claxton’s “Ode To BRAMS,” in which her eighth graders got a chance to bid the school—and each other—farewell. As a voiceover from Claxton filled the auditorium, students soaked in each word, some of them in tears by the time the lights came up. As she spoke (watch and listen to the number in full below), she praised students not just for their strength and hard work, but for their kindness.
As students looked out into the audience, moving slowly to Justin Bieber’s “Purpose,” photos of the class played on the projector, painting a picture of just how close these dancers have become in the past four years. On stage, they moved toward each other and then away, raising their hands to the sky before falling back to the stage. At the center of the group, Diaz raised her whole chest to the ceiling and then lowered herself again, as if she had a current of energy running right through her.
For those who know it, Claxton’s choreography is all about giving students ownership of their own power, from explosive, detailed footwork and flips in mid-air to leaps off tabletops and declarations that Black Lives Matter, that it’s okay to not be okay, that climate change is real and school bullying is an insidious evil.
In an eighth grade sendoff at the end of the show, it was clear that the love is mutual. Trying not to cry, students thanked both Claxton and Healey for their work, noting how much they would miss the dynamic duo when they graduate later this month. When the tears inevitably started for almost every dancer, the audience cheered them on with cries of “Awww!” and “Yes” and “You got this baby!”
“I’m so very grateful for you pushing me to do my best,” Diaz said before she crumpled into tears, and tried to get the words out between sobs.
“You have helped me become the person that I am,” Vogt said to Healey through tears. “You have taught me how to be persevering, you have taught me to be dedicated, but most importantly you have taught me to express myself on and off the stage.”
For more from the performance, check out the videos above or visit the Arts Council's Instagram.