Dance | Drama | Education & Youth | Visual Arts | New Haven Academy
New Haven Academy dance students perform at the Winter Arts Showcase. Photos Kapp Singer.
The curtain slowly opened, revealing a group of dancers huddled together, arms crossed, bathed in a blue spotlight. Half the group ducked left, the other half ducked right. As a trap remix of Nas’s “Hate Me Now” began playing, New Haven Academy 12th grader Kani Kee strutted down the center to the front of the stage. With a huge smile on his face, he pumped his right arm in a circle, hyping up the crowd. The other dancers took their positions beside him and, with precision and energy, launched into their choreography.
So was the scene at New Haven Academy’s Winter Arts Showcase on Thursday night, with dancers, actors, and visual artists showing off their semester’s work in the school’s gym-turned-auditorium. The multimedia event is the first of its kind for the school, which in the past has held winter and spring dance showcases, but never a night with students showcasing multiple art forms, principal Greg Baldwin said at the top of the show.
“I thought dance would be fun to do for my senior year,” Aria Keane, who had not taken a dance class before this semester, said. “I’ve made so many friends and completely stepped out of my shell. This has made me not so anxious.”
Carissa Kee-Conyers, the dance teacher at NHA, said that the class is made up of dancers of all skill levels.
“They all help each other out and it all comes together,” Kee-Conyers said. “I’m super proud of them.”
Over the course of the evening, the class performed three numbers, all choreographed by Kee-Conyers. The first was an Afrobeats-inspired dance, which blended traditional African music and dance with hip-hop sounds and movements.
The second featured a mix of several popular hip-hop songs, and the last piece “is just a very hype, exciting and energetic dance,” Kee-Conyers said. “Hopefully it will get people jumping out of their seats.”
“The program here at NHA is primarily geared towards hip-hop dance, which is really different in the magnet school world,” Kee-Conyers said. “I believe we are probably the only arts program that specializes in hip-hop.”
The energy of the dances that evening was counterbalanced by serene works by students in Tyler Rutherford’s visual arts classes. The gallery space, set up in the cafeteria, showcased a plethora of prints, paintings and drawings, from evocative abstract matrices of lines to realistic still lifes of watering cans, skulls, and flowers.
In 9th grader Ifadayo Engel-Halfkenny’s watercolor, a tree with spindly branches rises up out of rainbow soil. 11th grader Samira Wali also took arboreal inspiration, creating a bold and simple ink mono print of a bird on a branch.
The bird, blue with a yellow beak, sits among green leaves and looks up hopefully at white clouds in a clear sky, bringing a hopeful taste of spring to a cold and icy winter week.
Watercolor by 9th grader Ifadayo Engel-Halfkenny.
Ink mono print by 11th grader Sahmira Wali.
The evening also featured several monologues and a scene performed by students in Ty Scurry’s drama class.
“I was nervous, but I feel like I did a pretty good job,” NHA Sophmore Cristian Ortiz, who had never performed for a crowd before, said. “I just love portraying different characters.”
Ortiz portrayed a character named Demetrius in a humorous scene set at a KeyBank holiday party outside a Cleveland nightclub from Eric Coble’s play The Flats.
Freshman Michelle Cochran delivered a monologue from the character Ruby in August Wilson’s King Hedley II. Standing in a white spotlight, Cochran acted out the somber moment in which Ruby finds out her son’s father was murdered.
“Then everything stopped,” she said, as her voice rang out with Ruby’s description of the moment she saw the body. The audience seemed to hold its collective breath as Cochran took a dramatic pause in the monologue.
Michelle Cochran performs a monologue from August Wilson's King Hedley II.
“Today we did great,” Cochran said, after her performance. She is a seasoned actress, having performed in NHA’s after school drama program Legacy Studios’ productions of Paradise Blue and Heart.
“We had about a month to put these monologues and scenes together, and I’m really proud of their work,” Scurry said. “They really have pushed hard.
“I always tell the students that the characters you’re portraying don’t know they’re characters in monologues,” Scurry added. “Outside these pages, these people don’t exist, so your job is to make sure you’re living in real-time through those characters. If we live within the pages, then we can properly portray the characters.”