Top: Dr. Shaylice Meserole and her youngest son, Kai, Nikki Claxton, and Tajhma Burrows. Bottom: India Little and Christine Kershaw in her Horton I class. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In a studio just off Amity Road, India Little stretched her body towards the ceiling, lengthening her torso as her arms rose over her head. On her left shoulder, a trio of butterflies spread their wings across her skin, and suddenly looked as though they were in flight. She made her body into a straight line, feet firmly rooted to the floor.
“I want you to make sure to lift your body nice and tall,” said Christine Kershaw, a veteran dance educator who is trained in the Horton Technique, as she walked from dancer to dancer, doing gentle adjustments. “If I come around I should not be able to put your arms down.” She examined five pairs of hands that had risen across the room. “Let the thumb be a part of the hand.”
Kershaw, a daughter of New Haven who has spent decades teaching and learning dance, is part of the Elements Dance & Movement Conservatory (EDMC), a new technique-centered dance studio that is housed within the Yarrow Center for Wellness at 17 Hazel Terrace in Woodbridge. Focused on the fundamentals of dance itself, the studio opened last month with a week of free classes, and is now enrolling students for the 2025-26 year.
EDMC currently offers classes in tap, ballet, jazz, contemporary, acro dance, African dance and the Horton Technique, as well as meditation, practice in jumps and turns, aerobics and stretching and strengthening. Unlike many other studios in the area, it does not hold recitals or participate in competitions: its goal is preparing dancers for the wider professional world, and honing process and technique. Register for classes here; the studio also offers solo lessons.
“Dance saved my life,” said Dr. Shaylice Meserole, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and mom of three who co-owns the Yarrow Center, and brought on longtime dance educator Nikki Claxton as the conservatory’s artistic director. “As a nurse practitioner, I’m constantly emphasizing the importance of movement … I think the stress in my life is higher when I’m not dancing! That musicality and that movement” can be life-changing.
The conservatory, which sits alongside a sensory gym in the former home of Tia Russell Dance Studio, is a long-held dream among three generations of dancers and dance educators in New Haven. Decades ago, Claxton started thinking about the necessity of technique when she was still just starting out, and Kershaw was her teacher at Dee Dee’s Dance Center, itself an institution that holds decades of New Haven dance history.
At the time, Claxton was just a kid from New Haven, coming up through the city’s public schools. Dance wasn’t, in fact, her first love: that honor went to gymnastics. But under Kershaw’s watchful eye, Claxton immersed herself in the art form, with a flair for jazz and modern that flowed from classes at Dee Dee’s to Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS, now BRADA) when it was still in Wooster Square, where Conte-West Hills Magnet School stands today.
By the time Claxton was on the cusp of adulthood, Kershaw had convinced her to apply for a summer intensive with the prestigious Ailey School, part of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Claxton got in, and was thrilled. But when she arrived—well-versed in all that New Haven had taught her—she realized that she didn’t know very much about ballet. She asked the teachers to put her in the lowest class, where she ultimately ended up after auditioning.
It instilled in her, even then, a belief that the fundamental building blocks of dance—the elements of the form—are important, no matter the genre an artist ultimately chooses to pursue. During the summer she spent at Ailey, Claxton studied ballet rigorously, letting its lessons shape her work in and beyond the studio. She excelled in her other classes, using her New Haven knowledge to soar in New York.
When she became a dance educator years later—Claxton started teaching at BRAMS in 1996, meaning that next year will mark her third decade in the New Haven Public Schools—she knew she wanted to share that with students. But at the school, her capacity was (and is) finite: she can only work with so many dancers for so long, before trusting that they can make their way out into the wider world.
“I want our kids to be ready for whatever the world throws at them, not to feel defeated or out of place,” she wrote in a reflection shortly before the center opened. “Training takes time, effort, passion, practice, sacrifice, and hard work. The more you do anything, the better you get at it. When it’s done incorrectly, it takes time to unlearn, but it’s never too late.”
The magic of EDMC, she added, is that she’s able to bring that emphasis on technique outside of the classroom. At Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy, Claxton works with her students to both master technique and learn how to harness their own power, an approach to the form that has influenced generations of dancers. She’s highly collaborative, working to make sure that her students are taking care of not just their bodies, but also their emotional health.
In addition to Claxton and Kershaw, teachers include Tavon Dudley, who is in his second year of teaching at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School (and a handful of other studios, because that’s the life of an artist), Co-Op and Dean College grad Nevaeh Collier, New Haveners J’Nia Smalls, India Little, and Bradyn Pettway (who went on from Co-Op to perform at the VMAs), stylist and author Jazmi Zanders and Michelle Powell.
Together, they represent a full circle of support: Claxton was Kershaw’s student, Dudley had both Claxton and Kershaw, and many of their colleagues had some combination of the three. Many have also studied with the trio outside of the classroom: Between them, Claxton, Kershaw and Dudley teach part-time at over half a dozen studios, from the Hamden Academy of Dance & Music to the Lee Lund Studio of Dance in Milford to St. Savior’s Episcopal Church in Old Greenwich.
“When I heard who was gonna be teaching,” there was no question in Claxton’s mind that she would take the job as artistic director, she said. “If I had had this when I was little,” it would have changed her whole understanding of dance. Decades later, she’s still learning, she said—including in classes with her fellow EDMC colleagues.
“It’s my hope that these kids get out into the world and they’re prepared,” Meserole added.
That was fully on view Monday, as Kershaw welcomed a small group of students into her Horton I class, which she thinks of as an introduction to the Horton Technique (there is also a Horton II class and Adult Horton). The technique is named after twentieth-century choreographer Lester Horton, who grew up in the American Midwest but spent most of his formative years as a dancer and choreographer in California.
During his lifetime, Horton worked with artists from Clara Bates to Alvin Ailey to Carmen de Lavallade, passing onto them some of the influences that they then passed on to many others. Inspired in large part by Indigenous and Non-Western movement practices, the technique centers 17 “fortifications,” positions that are meant to help recenter and strengthen dancers, whatever genre they ultimately choose to pursue.
Already, Kershaw had welcomed students into the studio, watching them fan out to the gentle pitter-patter and swishing of feet across the floor. She had introduced multiple tenets of Horton, including lateral sides and a natural, kind of widened second position. Now, she spread her feet shoulder-length apart, and stretched her arms toward the floor, as if there was a string, held taut and steady, that ran from her fingertips down to her feet.
“You’re gonna start here, arms at your sides, but strong and graceful,” she said. She turned her palms toward the wall-length mirror that ran across one side of the room. “I love standing like this.”
Behind her left shoulder, Little stood up a little straighter, her feet planted on the floor. Growing up in New Haven, Little didn’t go to any of the city’s arts schools—she’s a Sacred Heart Academy grad—but she got to know many of her now-colleagues at Dance Unlimited and Dee Dee’s. While she teaches tap at EDMC, she enrolled in Horton I to get back to the basics.
“It’s a really nice outlet,” she said of both dance and specifically the vibe at EDMC. “I come here a lot and it’s really exciting that we get to share the space” with people who are all dedicated to deepening their practice, no matter how long they’ve been studying.
As she stretched her body toward the floor and toward the ceiling Monday, the sound of breath filled the room. Little looked forward, her eyes wide, her body still as Kershaw padded around the room and offered adjustments.
“You have to lengthen,” Kershaw emphasized as she moved, never raising her voice. “Lengthen! Leeeee-ngth-eeeen!”
As she moved through the room, she painted a portrait of patience and conviction, the kind of teacher who will run fortifications for hours after school if it’s what a student asks for. “You have a beautiful high parallel,” she said to Oni David, who smiled in response. “Anything that hurts?” she asked a few minutes later, advising a student to soften her knees before moving on to parallel leg lifts.
“Good! I hear the noise! I hear the brush!” she said a few beats after that, brightening as the lifts started and feet swept back and forth across the floor. Even as class wound down, she led with gratitude, praising dancers’ feet for the hard work they do each day. “They’re holding us up!” she said with a smile.
For Kershaw, who came to dance at 18 years old, the work EDMC does is a fundamental part of being a dancer, and a breath of fresh and long-awaited air. Born and raised in New Haven, she didn’t discover dance until she was a student at a then-nascent ACES Educational Center for the Arts, and met the late Paul Hall. Hall, who ran a dance company in New Haven until his death in the 1990s, took her under his wing and taught her after class.
It changed her life. Hall could see his student’s natural ability for dance and invited her to join the company, which she did while also getting her footing at Co-Op, at Dee Dee’s, and in the late 1990s, at Lee Lund Dance Studio (she has hundreds of former students who she’s kept tabs on, including New Haven Fire Department Asst. Chief Shakira Samuel).
“I really want dancers in New Haven to learn Horton, to know the terminology,” and to have that training as they venture out into the world of professional dance that exists beyond New Haven.
It’s as much about technique as it is about self-confidence, she added. Years ago, Kershaw encouraged one of her high school students to apply to the Ailey summer intensive, which she did. Before she headed to New York, the two spent hours reviewing technique after school. But when Ailey staff members asked if any students could name the Horton fortifications, the student didn’t step forward.
She knew exactly what they were. She could have done them in her sleep. But suddenly, in the midst of a new cohort of dancers, she made herself small.
“It’s about positive reinforcement,” Kershaw said. The classes are teaching students about strength, rigor and technique, but they are also helping instill “faith in themselves.”
“I still learn different things constantly,” she added. When Kershaw isn’t teaching, she makes time to study ballet with Ruth Barker, whose late husband, Noble, was the founder and artistic director of the New Haven Ballet. She still does pedagogy workshops with The Ailey School when she can fit them in. And she learns from her students.
“I think this is great,” she said of EDMC. “It gives me the opportunity to correct students and make sure their technique is correct. It’s important to know the fundamentals because it [Horton] translates to all techniques.”
Back out in the lobby, her students echoed that excitement. Pettway, who has danced at the Video Music Awards and more recently for New Year’s Eve celebrations in New York’s Times Square, said he’s thrilled to be dancing alongside—and learning from—people who have helped him become the dancer that he is.
“It feels full-circle being here and being with faculty I trained under,” he said.
“It’s A Treasure”
Dudley teaching at Co-Op last year. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
In some ways, that’s built into the DNA of the Yarrow Center itself, which will offer classes in yoga, pilates, and mindfulness and meditation (like the conservatory, it’s also just getting off the ground). When Meserole began building out the space months ago, she thought often about the role that dance played, and still plays, in her own life. As a kid, she started dancing “out of the womb,” and now wants that for more of the people in her orbit.
Her mom, Michelle Bragg, was a teacher at Dee Dee’s Dance Center, and the space quickly became her second home. In high school, she tried to attend ACES ECA, but ultimately went to Hill Regional Career High School to keep her dance schedule at Dee Dee’s consistent. Even afterwards, she danced at the University of Connecticut, bringing a dance team to the school in the early 2000s. “I recognized dance as a form of connection,” she said.
But when she graduated from college in 2010, Meserole stopped dancing. Life got busy: she attended Fordham University, and then Yale, for degrees in education and nursing. She juggled school, parenting and work, building a practice as she finished her master’s, and then went back for her doctorate. She became a mom three times over (her youngest, 18-month-old Kai, is perhaps the Elements’ youngest and most enthusiastic dancer).
In her work, however, she’s never lost sight of the connection between movement and mental health. Often, she said, she suggests some kind of movement-based practice for her own clients, whether it’s dance or yoga or something else. She can feel her own stress level going down when she makes time to move her body.
So when a space opened up on Hazel Terrace, in the back of the building where she already had a Woodbridge-based practice, it felt like kismet. Yarrow, so named after the wildflower with over a dozen healing properties, bloomed into being.
She doesn’t do any of it alone, she’s quick to say. Meserole owns and runs the space with longtime friend Tajhma Burrows, an occupational therapist who also attended Dee Dee’s Dance Center as a young girl, but stopped by the time she was in high school. In her practice, Burrows works with kids and young adults on emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, and fine and gross motor skills, often fielding referrals from pediatricians, teachers, and schools.
Inside the center, she operates a large, brightly-lit sensory gym, where rainbow-colored tumbling mats now cover the floor and bright, pint-sized chairs and different-colored medicine balls stand along one wall, just waiting for little bodies to occupy them. On Monday evening, she looked out over the room as she chatted about the mission, greeting Kai excitedly as he scurried inside and made a beeline for the chairs.
Kershaw and Dudley at Co-Op in 2024. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
In that sense, the conservatory fits directly into that vision. Earlier this year, a study in the European journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise concluded that dance, in part because of the focus and rigor that it demands, can help relieve and mitigate chronic stress.
Teachers, almost all of whom came out of the New Haven Public Schools, are proof positive of that: all of them have stayed with dance, and particularly dance education, for the sense of joy and necessity that it brings into their own lives. In a phone call Wednesday night, Dudley stressed the magic that dance has brought into his life, and the wish he has to pass that on to other people. When he heard that EDMC was opening, there was no doubt in his mind that he wanted to be part of it.
In addition to EDMC, where he teaches all of the ballet classes, Dudley teaches Monday through Friday at Co-Op, and spends weeknights traveling between studios in Hamden, North Haven, and Old Greenwich, where he’s an instructor. Last year, he said with a laugh, he promised himself that he was going to cut back on teaching. Instead, the opposite happened. He keeps saying yes to educator gigs, he thinks, because he loves the learning process so much.
“When I teach, I try to constantly think of ways that I can explain what I am trying to do in a way that makes sense to them [students],” he said. “I get an adrenaline rush when I look into their eyes and I see the ‘A-ha!’ and it's like the most rewarding sensation ever. I never liked performing.I like the process, because I like the moments where it made sense to me.”
That’s what’s so special about the Elements, he added.
“I think it's a treasure,” he said. “Nikki, for decades, has been cultivating and molding dancers, so many that I can think of. It was overdue for her to have her own space.”