Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School | Culture & Community | Dance | Education & Youth | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Public Schools | Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy
Top: Students in "Mad World," choreographed by longtime dance teacher Nikki Claxton. Bottom: Members of the choir sing “Amani Utupe,” conducted by Ms. Harriett Alfred. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In the ruby red glow of a Kimberly Avenue auditorium, students had transformed into silent, masked figures, not quite human and not quite other, either. On the lip of the stage, they rose on their knees, grabbing their torsos as they shuddered to the floor, then slumped to one side. They rose again, swaying as they rolled their necks and shoulders back toward the audience.
Behind them, a stream of now-familiar images never stopped: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers walking toward a car, a young child, belly swollen from hunger, a Ukrainian flag, its bright blocks of blue and yellow flapping in the wind. A woman crouched over her phone in the dark, scrolling. A cartoon brain swelled with the news of the day. Dancers, feeling it all, stood and spread their feet to shoulder length, hands pulled to the sides of their heads as they swayed back and forth.
Thursday morning, Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy (BRADA, previously Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School) students brought a sharp-eyed and fleet-footed energy to a rehearsal for the school’s annual winterfest, using their respective art forms to talk about informed consent, national and global politics, the fierce and fickle nature of faith itself, and the ways in which they are each other’s keeper. Held in the school’s cavernous auditorium, it became a rare glimpse into the conversations students are having both in and out of the spotlight, and the ways they are looking out for themselves and each other through the arts.
Disciplines included dance, band, strings and choir, the last of which NHPS veteran Harriett Alfred has stepped temporarily out of retirement to substitute teach. In addition, students contributed both visual and video art, with short presentations that wove in and out of live performance. This year, the event took place just months after the school welcomed its first freshman class.
A moment in Hannah Healey's sublime "Hallelujah."
“We are really trying to teach our kids to use their art as a form of communication,” said BRADA Arts Director Amy Migliore, who started at the school earlier this year, after several years at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. “We feel very strongly about their ability to communicate what they feel about the world in their art, and I feel that this show really does embrace that in a lot of ways. We’re excited about that, and we’re excited to do more of that moving forward.”
Walking into the auditorium Thursday morning, a person could see and hear that firsthand, from the band’s cacophonous and spirited takes on “Variants on an Old English Carol” and “Feliz Navidad” to dances that left students slack-jawed and stunned into silence in their seats. As the band warmed up with director David Love, students pored over the music, some already feeling those pre-vacation wiggles that made it hard to stay still.
From a tech booth suspended over the auditorium, teacher Christi Pidskalny Sargent fiddled with the lights, the band cloaked in the dramatic shading of a Dutch still life painting. Love, working through the din of several conversations, reminded students to focus. Laughter escaped from a seat, and disappeared almost as quickly. Students, instruments in their hands and laps, looked up expectantly, waiting to begin as a video played in Winterfest behind them.
On a pull-down screen, students flexed their artistic muscles, jumped behind the camera lens, and took candid shots of each other in the library and hallways. Back in the auditorium, seventh grader Yamaliel “J.J.” Gutierrez steadied the saxophone in his lap, and double checked his sheet music for “North Pole Sleigh Ride.” After picking the instrument up at BRADA, he said, he’s been able to focus more, and remember the importance of things like practice and repetition.
Yamaliel “J.J.” Gutierrez (in cream-colored hoodie) helps a fellow bandmate prepare for "North Pole Sleigh Ride."
Within seconds, he was showing that off in real time, with suggestions of “Greensleeves” that filtered and peeked through bellowing brass in Robert Smith’s arrangement of “Variant on an Old English Carol.” Behind students, a video backdrop brought the holiday spirit alive, weaving student artworks into questions like “What about winter gives you a feeling of wonder?” (Spoiler: The answer is always hot cocoa, and sometimes snow).
Love, who said that the shift from BRAMS to BRADA “has definitely been a change,” from earlier classes to new students, had more musical surprises in his back pocket. In “North Pole Sleigh Ride,” young musicians summoned a wintry landscape, conjuring a sleigh that soared through half a dozen Christmas carols in minutes, and hit only a few select, squeaky and well-worn patches of ice along the way. By “Feliz Navidad,” students were jamming. In the audience, a few of their classmates danced along.
“That’s our banger,” Love said with a smile afterwards, as he got situated back in his classroom.
Back onstage, the event became a space for surprising, humor-flecked and sometimes difficult conversations, including ones meant to protect peers during a season where family can be overwhelming. Presenting the “Mistle-no,” students of drama teacher Daniel Sarnelli walked on to a minimal set, tending a small Christmas tree that had materialized at stage right.
Top: Ayliz Boran, Uche Eze, Rose Natal and Sage Edwards in "The Mistle-No." Bottom: Strings student Legend Bolton, who plays the double bass.
When an adoring auntie (Londyn Mercer) rushed in, clad in a fur coat and hands ready to pinch some baby cheeks, the student actors grumbled and shifted uncomfortably. Then they remembered themselves, and reached for a silver, glittery bauble on the tree—the Mistle-no, an ornament that helps people protect their personal space at the holidays. In the audience, a few dozen peers began to laugh as they waited for their own time in the spotlight.
The scene rewound itself, Mercer-as-auntie exiting, then entering again. This time, when she stepped in to wrap her nephew (Uche Eze) in a less-than-consensual Christmas embrace, he lifted the Mistle-no, activating its powerful force field with a single touch. Mercer, who helped write the show from her own experience, helped play up the physical humor, waving her arms in dismay as she pushed against the imaginary protective bubble Eze had created around himself.
Only after the skit did Mercer share how much of a personal chord it had struck. In her home, defined by a big, warm Haitian American family, declining a hug or taking a moment to oneself “it’s seen as very disrespectful.” So is going up to her room for a moment of quiet. So as she braces for another holiday season, she’s been thinking about how to redraw her boundaries.
She didn’t realize her drama classes could help her until they were doing just that.
“Listen, I get it,” Mercer said. She has nieces, and is no stranger to the joy of fussing over little hands and chubby cheeks. But “a lot of families have that one relative, or a lot of relatives, who are very handsy. For a lot of people, that’s not okay.”
Londyn Mercer and Uche Eze.
The skit used humor as a kind of door, added seventh grader Sage Edwards. Before coming to BRADA, she faced years of bullying at her old school, and it made her self-conscious about her appearance and the way she moved through the world. Now, she sees satire as both a balm and a coping mechanism, through which people are able to lean into the discomfort until it’s literally a laugh line.
At other points in the show, students dug in, making their voices heard—sometimes with no words at all—on everything from the sublime and sacred to a wild world they are learning to make their way through. In the choral selections “Amani Utupe” and “Ríu Ríu Chíu,” students lifted their voices to the high ceiling, taking on both Swahili and Spanish as they clapped in time with the music. In “Midnight Frost” and “Fiddler’s Hoedown,” string musicians worked to fill the gaps when they realized a classmate was out sick.
Dancing to Kirk Franklin & The Family’s “Now Behold the Lamb,” dancers struck that delicate spot between soul-stirring praise and rigorous, crisp technique for which teacher Nikki Claxton is sometimes known. As musicians belted from somewhere over a speaker, eighth grader Tatum Cannon ran on from the wings, and went airborne, her body constantly in motion.
“Whatever emotions I’m feeling on the stage, I just leave it out there,” she said in an interview afterward. For her, dancing is a way to block out the noise, particularly when the news feels like too much to handle.
“It felt good,” added sixth grader Londyn Brockington. “I feel like it’s [dance is] another part of me coming out here [on stage], and I get to express my feelings.”
In the audience, a person could feel that same lump-in-the throat sense of something divine as students took the stage for Hannah Healey’s “Hallelujah,” letting the words travel through their bodies as they extended their arms and spread out across the stage.
Healey, herself a graduate of the New Haven Public Schools, has often brought a kind of quiet strength and grace to this season of miracles (read more about that here and here), and this year was no exception.
At one point, students moved towards each other, and froze in a tableau of lights and darks that felt like the world itself. At another, eighth grader Kimberly Gardner made her way to the lip of the stage, kneeling in a pool of light. As she brought a fist to her chest, it seemed as though she was praying, a movement that dancers soon caught onto and began to do together.
When students finished in a blue-black silhouette, the group drenched in shadow, the image remained long after they had left the stage.
“I feel like dance helps show people how I feel and what my mood is,” said eighth grader Julian Durio after the rehearsal, stopping in the hallway before he hurried to his next class. “This dance, it made me think about God, how he was born on the 25th, and embracing his love.”
Dance also teaches him “to like, not be scared to do what I want to do,” he added.
And they weren’t. Nestled between performances from the strings and the choir, dancers in Nikki Claxton’s classes summoned both courage and compassion as they took the floor to 2WEI, Tommee Profitt & Fleurie’s cover “Mad World,” a dramatic and synthy take on the 1982 original by Tears For Fears. On stage, the lights turned to an infernal red, dancers’ skin glowing as they looked out onto the audience.
Gone were the smiling, doe-eyed adolescents that make the school their home, replaced with leotard-clad, masked forms that seemed alien, eerily anonymous. As the lyrics made their way out into the auditorium, dancers began to shift into lines, eyes fixed between the video screen and the audience on the other side of the stage.
They sank, slowly, towards the ground and then rose, arms outstretched. They rotated, making their cores seem pliable for a moment, until their bodies synced with the sound of gears slowly, loudly turning with a crack. At turns, they froze with their faces fixed on the audiences, then rotated their heads until it felt like the slow, unsettling rise of the machines.
On the screen (a shout out to teacher Matthew Young, who did the video editing), global horrors played out one after the other. A house, its exterior charred and peeling, looked ready to fall apart. Masked ICE agents, dressed like the ones who took a mother away from her kids just blocks from the school, trudged through fresh-fallen snow to make an arrest. Smokestacks, patterned red and white like perverse, dirty candy canes, belched thick clouds of exhaust into the air.
Top: A moment from "Mad World." Bottom: Theater students in the skit "Casting 101," directed by Daniel Sarnelli.
A homeless man held up a sign that read “Seeking Human Kindness,” and onstage dancers ran for the wings until just a few remained, bending back and holding their heads as if to block out the noise.
“When I do ‘Mad World,’ I just think of everything that’s going on—it’s a hard time,” said Kamren Robinson, a seventh grader at the school. In his classes, he doesn’t always feel like he’s allowed to talk about what’s happening. But “I can talk about it with my grandma,” and he does. He’s grateful that this gives him another outlet, he said.
To cope with the overwhelm, “I don’t really be on my phone,” chimed in seventh grader Ralani Moody after rehearsal. Instead, “I fast and I pray and I study the Bible,” and she keeps herself on top of her school work.
Before the final notes of the song rang out, every dancer had their eyes fixed on the audience, arms extended to point at the rows and rows of chairs that would soon be filled. They brought their hands back to their chests, then spread their arms a final time, as if they were strong and wide enough to hold the weight of the whole world.
“For me, we’re saying, in this world of madness, it will be okay,” said Claxton, a New Haven Public Schools alum who has taught in the district for three decades, and has used dance as a powerful tool to talk about everything from book bans to mental health and suicidality to Black Lives Matter. When she started working on the dance earlier this year, she spoke to students about how precarious the world could feel. She also made sure that her classroom was a safe space for them, as it has been for years.
It created an opening where they were able to discuss the man-made atrocities—climate change, war, starvation, waves of racism, xenophobia and rising anti-immigrant hate—that were affecting her life, and theirs. When she asked her students to bring in a visual that personified the “mad world,” many turned to photographs from the last year, from still photographs of the current occupant of the White House to communities now living in fear of family separation.
That’s the point of the gesture toward the end of the song, she said. After working through the news of this year—and the years that came before it—she and students wanted to make it clear to the audience that resistance and healing are collective acts, from which no person is exempt. The answer to a "mad world," in other words, is moving forward together.
Now, “what are we gonna do to change what is happening?” she asked.