It was the tinny swell of 80s-style synth and the boom of a drum machine that tipped people off to something strange stirring in a first-floor hallway of Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy (BRADA) Friday morning.
In the lobby, 50 students pressed themselves against the walls and doorways, listening for what might come next. Down the hall, lockers began to shift and jiggle on their hinges. One by one, the metal doors swung open, zombies sliding out of them with their eyes locked on the humans ahead.
Fearsome footwork filled the halls of BRADA that morning, as seventh and eighth grade students enrolled in the school’s dance emphasis emerged from lockers, extended their arms to perfect zombie length, slithered along the floor, and transformed the New Haven magnet school into a haunted house just in time for Halloween. For weeks, the young dancers have been meeting after-school to learn choreography to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” with teacher Nikki Claxton, a veteran educator who has been at Betsy Ross for 26 years.
At BRADA, which is in the process of turning itself into an arts high school after decades of teaching fifth through eighth grade, the dance has also been a chance for students to meet each other outside of their classes.
“This is the place where we’re looking to elevate what we’ve been doing and take it to the next level,” said Principal Jennifer Jenkins, whose daughter began dancing at BRADA, and is now a student choreographer at Vassar College. “We’re thinking of all the things we’ve kind of imagined over the years and making it happen. It’s things that we’ve talked about … we’re putting them into action, and taking it as far as we can.”
The Thriller piece has been in the making since last year, when Halloween fell on a Friday. Claxton, a self-described Michael Jackson super fan, started thinking about how much fun it would be to bring the dance to life. As a longtime educator and the mom of a college freshman, she sees firsthand how much pressure her students are under — especially now that they have the internet at their fingertips for much of the day (although not during school hours thanks to a district-wide ban on cell phones).
Normally, she’s not shy about bringing it into her classroom or onto the stage: her students have performed dances that address book bans, bullying, suicidality, Black history and the Black Lives Matter movement, and global conflict. Many of her students have followed her beyond the classroom, and work on technique at the Elements Dance and Movement Conservatory in Woodbridge, where she is the artistic director.
But “I just wanted to do something fun with them,” she said in an interview in her classroom earlier this week, as a few students trickled in to talk about what the dance has meant to them. “Thriller,” she knew from years of watching the video and dancing herself, would give students a reason to get silly and a little strange.
So in September, shortly after the beginning of the school year, she put up a notice for rehearsals. “If you’re afraid to be creepy, this is not for you,” she wrote. Ultimately, 13 students helped put the dance together during weeks of after-school rehearsals.
“I didn’t really know what I was getting into,” said Nalia Nevin, an eighth grader who plans to dress up as the large, furry turquoise creature Sulley from the film “Monsters, Inc.” for Halloween. “Like, I love to be creepy. I watch horror movies with my dad. I just feel like it’s the only time of year that you can do anything without judgement … sometimes you can just let yourself be that character.”
“It keeps a lot of energy up and it gives me positive vibes,” she added of joining the “Thriller” ensemble.
Eighth grader Destiny Trimble, who is still putting the final touches on a Mad Hatter costume that she plans to wear for Halloween, said she was especially grateful for the rehearsal process, because it gave her a chance to bond with fellow students outside of class. That, and she never thought she would finish middle school knowing how to fit herself into a locker, and then fling it open while preparing to dance down the hallway.
As a longtime dancer, the newness of “Thriller” also surprised her, she said. For her, there’s something freeing about being weird, even for just four and a half minutes, at an age where her peers can feel judgemental.
“And I get to be crazy,” she said with a mischievous smile.
Friday, that excitement was palpable by the time school started. Just shy of 8 a.m., students scurried up the school’s staircase to Claxton’s second-floor dance studio and slipped into their homemade costumes, a mix of ripped jeans, tights rubbed in dirt and makeup, old sweaters and time-softened T-shirts that had met their match with scissors and slasher-style red paint. If a person popped in unannounced, they might have thought they had found, at long last, a real-life version of “The Final Girl Support Group.”
Ralani Moody, an eighth grader at the school, remembered tearing up an old blouse and short dress that were sitting unused in her closet, and then covering them with makeup that Claxton had brought in. Before leaving the room, she checked the costume on seventh grader Kennedy Artis, imagining how a ripped, oversized plaid shirt might look with brown-green grease paint and mussed-up hair.
Around them, the school day had begun. Snippets from brass and woodwind instruments rose up from the open door of a band classroom downstairs. Administrators hurried around the office in matching back-and-rainbow BRADA t-shirts, half-unaware that a congress of the undead was about to take over the lobby. Drama teacher Daniel Sarnelli rolled in to discover that his classroom, the lights still off, had temporarily been taken over by a trio of zombies waiting on directions from their teacher.
In the school’s green room, art teacher Ramzie Highsmith was waiting with eyeliner, grease paint, fake blood and creamy foundation to make the transformation complete. As he invited students into an artist’s chair — he’s taught visual arts in the district for three years, but worked as a certified makeup artist for almost a decade — peers hopped into action around him, pairing off with palettes and makeup brushes balanced in their hands.
Eighth grader Oni David, who has danced with Claxton for three years, took a moment to try a back bend with seventh grader Jules Sullivan Young, the two dissolving into giggles as she lost her balance and slid backwards on the floor. Claxton appeared in the doorway and checked her watch. There were 12 minutes until 9:30 a.m., and two students still needed makeup.
“Ghouls, get a move on,” she said, a smile dancing at the edges of her mouth even as she kept an eye on the clock.
“Can we go outside and pick some leaves?” student Londyn Brockington asked Claxton, worried that she was still too recognizable in a ripped-up old dance costume that she’d painted over with mascara.
She didn’t need to worry: a floppy babydoll collar, rubbed from white to reddish brown with makeup, made her look like she had walked straight out of the horror film 2022 “M3GAN,” about an evil animatronic doll.
Claxton beamed at Brockington. “No.”
“Well can I go out and rub my jazz shoes on the ground?”
Claxton smiled again, not needing to say anything at all.
Back at his chair, Highsmith scrunched his face for a moment, looking at a foundation palette opened on the counter. A range of beiges and browns stretched out across its surface in neat, identical squares. “This brown is too ashen,” he said. As he dipped a brush in white powder, he said he was happy to help. “Close your eyes and don’t breathe in,” he instructed a student.
“We need to get more chances to integrate the arts together!” he said as he hustled to finish one student’s makeup, and invited another into the chair. “We kind of are seen as such separate entities, but in performance, they all connect.”
Just after 9:30 a.m., those words came to life as a few classes filled the lobby, unaware of what they were about to see. As Claxton cued up the music to “Thriller,” the hallway was totally, eerily silent, save a teacher looking out periodically to see what was afoot. Then Delia Ortiz, who is in the eighth grade, swung her body out of a locker in which she had been crouching, and went into a full back bend, her hands holding the locker’s metal edge for support.
As she began to crawl down the hallway, like something slippery, swampy thing, Moody opened another door, and lowered herself to the ground. Brockington, slipping to the front of the pack, moved from a locker into a full split.
As their classmates followed, the group filled the space, peers gasping as they neared the lobby, and then flooded it in three lines of constant movement.
“Ohmygod!” teaching fellow Jorhenzi Esquivel exclaimed in a single breath as students rounded the corner. He later said he wasn’t scared, so much as totally delighted and tickled by the performance.
Those weeks of rehearsal really paid off. As Claxton watched, students took over the lobby, flinging themselves forward and hanging there for a moment before they rose, eyes turned up just slightly to reveal the whites.
Shoulders rose and rolled in mechanical, syncopated motion as they added a head bob and a slow zombie walk forward. They extended their arms, moving back and forth across the floor as legs kicked up, slicing through the air, and braids and ponytails flew through the air.
“I’m gonna have a lot of fun scaring people,” Brockington had said earlier in the morning. “I’m normally so kind to everybody.”
Following the performance Friday, the 13 students boarded a bus, en route to Benjamin Jepson Magnet School and Nathan Hale Elementary School, both in New Haven. That’s part of the hope as BRADA becomes a high school, said Assistant Principal Amy Migliore — to show other students in the district the work that these young artists are doing.
“We want the art to be everywhere,” Migliore said. “Not just in the classrooms, but to show kids that we can perform in different spaces and different places.”
Watch the full dance in the embedded video above.
