Co-Op High School | Culture & Community | Dance | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Yale Schwarzman Center
Top: Kori Tatman. Bottom: Alayna Ellis. Lucy Gellman Photos.
It was Monday morning in studio 206, and Kori Tatman felt more alive than she had in days.
At the front of the room, pumping bass exploded from the speakers, traveling from the floor into dancers’ bones. It was New Haven, circa 2024. It was Harlem, circa 1985. The bass reached her chest, and Tatman began to move in long, businesslike strides, sinking into her hips and shoulders. With each step, she connected to histories—of dance, of free expression, of Black and Brown LGBTQ+ solidarity—that made her love the form.
Monday, Tatman joined fellow Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School seniors in a master class from dancers Ondrej Vidlar and Perle Palombe, both longtime collaborators with Trajal Harrell and part of his performances with the Yale Schwarzman Center this week. In just an hour, they transported dancers from College Street to another universe, pushing them to connect with the rhythms of their own bodies.
“I was very much—I guess you could say, in my spirituality,” said Tatman after the class. “When she [Perle] was talking about the creativity inside of us and how we relate to it, it just connected me to the divine. I just love that. I do believe in a God, but I really believe that us all are a part of one unanimous love."
Palombe and Vidlar.
Harrell, who may be best known for his marriage of twentieth-century postmodern dance and underground ballroom culture, is the first performer of the Schwarzman Center’s fall season. In addition to a performance last weekend, his time in New Haven includes a talk at the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) on Monday afternoon and performance of his Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church on Tuesday evening. Learn more about those here.
But it was the master class, held above a bustling College Street in the school’s second-floor dance studio, that may have been his most organic gift to New Haven. On Monday morning, the studio had a specific, expectant kind of energy, like it had been waiting all weekend for students to return. As they trickled in with black bodysuits and neat coiffures, Vidlar and Palombe stood among them, chatting casually as one might in the lull between classes.
It was only when Vidlar announced warm ups that they fell to a hush, arranging themselves instantly into row. Heads swiveled obediently towards the front of the room. Walls of full-length mirrors, on which dancers can study themselves, became impromptu backrests as teachers and Schwarzman Center staff squeezed in. Students stood straight, prepared for the technical rigor they’ve come to expect from their dance classes.
Vidlar smiled: today was going to be a little different, he said. He spread his feet just slightly, soles flat on the floor. Switching on a soaring, synth-heavy track, he began to bounce at the knees, pulling in his elbows. His wrists relaxed, hands and fingers slack for the first time that morning. Vocals slipped in over the bass. Out the window, the low-hanging clouds gave a uniform curtain of gray.
“Try to breathe,” he said, doing an audible, exaggerated breath in. “And try to bring deep breathing, in and—ahhhhh—deep breathing out.” Another audible breath. “Shake it out. A bit more. Feel it, bouncing through the floor—” he appeared to dribble an imaginary basketball. “Feeling the floor, you can even close your eyes for a second, you will not miss anything.”
He pulled a hand momentarily to his right ear, running a finger along the rim. “I do want to hear the breathing. Don’t be afraid to let it out and make a sound.”
In the front row, Alondra Rodriguez was finding her breath. When she steps into the dance classroom, she later said, the art form has the ability to whisk her into a different universe. As she felt the floor beneath her feet, arms at her sides, Monday had that sort of feeling.
“It's definitely getting transported to a new world,” she later said. “You get to dive into different techniques, different styles. And so, it's a great way to kind of find yourself within dance—to show your own personality and tell stories.”
At the front of the room, Vidlar was just getting started. He and Palombe extended their arms, spreading their fingertips out towards the walls. He rose onto the balls of his feet, toes feeling the cool marley floor beneath him. He leaned just slightly in, watching as 12 pairs of eyes studied his every move. When he stopped to shake it out, a wave of gentle laughter filled the room.
“Always enjoy this moment of the suspension of the foot lifting itself from the floor,” he said. One row behind Rodriguez, Tatman pushed herself onto her toes, shoulders just slightly forward. She evened herself out, still hovering in space. Her fingers, which moments before had hung noodle-like, came to life, pointed toward the flood at precise, clean angles.
“Okay, let’s just move into walking,” Vidlar said, and he took a beat as students rearranged themselves and began to walk through the room. A few looked up with questioning glances, and he explained that this is known as pedestrian movement, or the idea that even walking can become dance. “Literally, feel how you walk in the space.”
When she spotted a few more hesitant faces, Palombe jumped in. “You’re connecting with the imagination,” she said. A tinkling of bells from the speaker system played softly beneath her voice.
From their neat rows, students became jumbled, agitated electrons, finding their way around each other as they wove through the space. Some pumped their arms, feeling out the space around them. A few let the studio fade away, bodies as alert and efficient as they might be in a busy city crosswalk. Just as they eased into it, turning the movement into a sort of ballet, Vidlar called them back to attention, finding a track that could weave in vogue and ballroom.
Sincere Shields.
With the first suggestion of a beat, students understood the assignment: smiles erupted from the group as dancers waved their hands and criss-crossed their feet in preparation. When Vidlar asked who would go first, Tatman barely let him finish his sentence before she started walking. Throwing her shoulders dramatically back, she made a beeline for the floor-to-ceiling windows, feet barely touching the floor as her toes made contact, and then lifted off again.
“Yasss!” declared one of her classmates, and it felt like a statement of what was possible that morning. “Okay!” cried another, and soon the group was channeling histories of LaBeija, Ninja, Xtravaganza that they had only ever read about. When Rodriguez began to move, her arms sliced through the air, hands bobbing as she moved. Beneath the light, tiny beige flowers glittered on her acrylic nails. When she reached the other end of the room, she whipped her head around, and Vidlar cheered from where he stood.
“I think it’s interesting when you create a step between the beat—a kind of rhythm in your body,” Palombe said. “The difference between the music and you … the rhythm inside yourself.”
Alondra Rodriguez, Xavier "Curtis" McClease, Sincere Shields, and Kori Tatman.
Students seemed to take the words to heart. When Alayna Ellis stopped and posed before walking back across the room, a knot of her peers exploded into cheers. When Sincere Shields added a little pop to his step, raising his hands above his head as if to praise a higher power, it was easy to imagine him in the heart of a ball, equal parts graceful and punchy.
Even Curtis McClease, who had hesitated when the music came on, sauntered cautiously across the room, spreading his arms as he found his feet, bent his knees, and flowed into a strut. When he has stage fright, he later said, “I just pretend” he knows what to do, and lets it come to him. It’s how he moves past fear, he added—like a constant worry that he might fall.
Back at the speaker, Vidlar slowed it down with Cat Power’s “Werewolf,” encouraging students to feel the music. Ellis glided through the space, reaching toward the wall with such a slow, palpable urgency that it seemed certain there was someone on the other side. Tatman raised her arms over her head, letting her fingers graze her neck on the way back down. McClease, still cautious, willed his legs forward and watched as they loosened to the sound.
McClease: Just pretend to get through the stage fright.
When it was Shields’ turn, he savored every moment.
“I was mostly in my own self-consciousness,” he said minutes later, in an interview after class. “Through the last four years, I used to be very shy, scared of everybody making fun of me or whatever. These four years helped me improve a lot. Helping to improvise those kinds of movements from my own self consciousness went a long, long way for me.”
“For me, dance is therapeutic,” added Tatman. “Very, very therapeutic. I go to a completely different place. I could go to a dance class with the most tense and anxious energy and walk out feeling like I'm on a cloud. It really relieves stress … It's kind of like a meditation for me.”
Back outside on College Street, Vidlar and Palombe transformed back into mere mortals, chatting about their plans for an afternoon talk, the suggestion of a chill in the air, their upcoming dance work in Philadelphia. Both said that they delight in the chance to work with young people, in no small part because they are the dancers of the future.
“Hopefully they [these students] open themselves for many different opportunities,” said Vidlar, who has worked with Harrell for 14 years. “For me, there is something about inclusion and helping each other. They have all these questions—like, it’s their own discovery period, figuring out what is the next thing. It’s so beautiful to watch that.”