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Top: Maelle Davenport, one of three dancers and nine artists featured Sunday. Bottom: Artists with Diaz and Pinkston. Prince Davenport Photos.
For a moment, it looked as though Maelle Davenport was praying. Her back stretched long and flat against the ground. She pulled her knees to her chest, palms outstretched before her face. Her fingers opened, and she searched for something in the space between them. Piano swirled around her and she rose, beginning to make her way across the room.
That scene came to The Sandbox at 70 Audubon St. last Sunday, as nine student artists presented "3 Degrees," the culmination of months of artmaking, rehearsal, and multi-media dialogue. The brainchild of poet, performer, mentor, doula and facilitator Yexandra Diaz—who herself wears multiple artistic hats—it sought to translate experiences across dance, poetry, and visual art.
Artists included poets Syra Barrett, Jayden Barrett, and Journey Rosa; visual artists Haason Pires, Dynasty Whitfield, and Vinny Ortiz; and dancers Maelle Davenport, Maegiani Davenport, and Zielimar Santana.
While Diaz birthed the project, she credited fellow poet (and her mentee) Tymani “GodisTymani Rain” Pinkston for working with poets, and instructors Latoya Nickee Walker, Maxine Bowden, and Whitney Lucky for working with dancers. Diaz also shouted out the Teaching Artist Hub and the City of New Haven’s Neighborhood Cultural Vitality Grant Program for making the initiative possible.
"Ekphrasis is the poetic interpretation of visual art," she wrote of the process after the performance. "There’s no word for the inverse so, I coined one: Ektheoria—a vision drawn out of poetry."
The making of "Three Degrees," which included nine extraordinary young artists, was in many ways a case study of how art forms can better talk to each other, and make deeper meaning in the process. Starting with the work of the three featured poets, young visual artists translated each work to canvas, with designs that ranged from subjects trying to break free from a wall of bars to people soaking up the bright, daisy-colored sun. Then the three dancers took those paintings, and translated them into original choreography.
The result was a series of intertwined pieces that spoke across time and space. After reading Rosa's words on how boxed in they can feel by a series of expectations, for instance, Ortiz created a work that was intensely reflective. So too as Whitfield seized onto a line from Jayden Barrett rephrasing Raffi's "Oh Mister Sun," a world in contrast appearing on the canvas. Dances, meanwhile, took that one step further, unfreezing the space that had seemed so fixed in the paintings and bringing it to the room's intimate and impromptu stage.
"3 Degrees began as my brainchild, but it was the students who brought it to life," Diaz wrote after the performance. "With the guidance of guest instructors and full creative freedom, these young artists created works that remind us of something vital: every child is born an artist. Unadulterated and unafraid … their imaginations are limitless."
Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.