Ann Garrett Robinson sent her daughter to Bowen/Peters School of Dance, where for two decades the iron-willed Angela Bowen (pictured) empowered black girls not only to sweep statewide competitions, but also to excel in other aspects of their lives for two decades.
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Caldwell leads West African dance workshop in honor of her teacher Bowen.
Robinson told that story at an afternoon-long tribute to Bowen, part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas Festival. Speakers reflected on Bowen’s inspiration to their girls, now women, in a variety of professions, as a powerful black feminist woman. Bowen, now in her mid-70s, was a devoted dance teacher inspiring black and low-income girls in New Haven. She became a prominent feminist activist and nationally-known scholar.
Robinson winked at her daughter, Connecticut’s youngest-ever appointed Superior Court Judge Angela Robinson, who was choking up on the stage with other former students on the panel.
“Bowen inspired me to be bold,” Angela Robinson said. “She planted more seeds than just giving dance lessons.”
The event, held last week and titled From Artist to Activist: A New Haven Legend, included a screening of a documentary about Bowen’s life, followed by a panel of five former students and colleagues. A mostly older crowd of Arts and Ideas attendees, including the many New Haveners Bowen touched, filled about half the Iseman Theatre. (Due to illness, Bowen herself could not attend.)
Bowen’s student Shari Caldwell (pictured) led a West African dance workshop just before the screening, for a more participatory celebration of her mentor’s work. Caldwell began to dance at Bowen/Peters School when she was 6 years old and “just never stopped,” she said, only taking a break to have a child.
Bowen and her then-husband Ken Peters “don’t know what they contributed to these young black kids in these communities. And it was coincidental that it was an ‘African-American’ dance school, because she certainly was not turning people away,” Caldwell said. “I’m extremely passionate and I just wanted everyone to know that Dr. Bowen passed the legacy on to myself to open up my dance school which is called Caldwell Dance Center in 2008.”
Before Bowen’s rise to fame as a black feminist activist and professor, she was known in the city as an intense and tough dance teacher, expecting a high level of precision and perfectionism from her dancers, aged 6 to 18, who practiced at the studio 5 to 6 days a week. Bowen and Peters sustained the studio at their own expense, and like Caldwell said, never turned anyone away, according to Lachanze, a Tony award-winning Broadway actor on the panel who used to be one of Bowen’s students.
Another former student, Carolyn Jenkins, said that despite the school’s and the students’ setbacks, Bowen’s tough training brought them to a higher caliber than anyone in the city thought possible.
“We won up against the white and rich schools. These big-butt black girls would sweep the competitions,” she said. “She was like a second mother to many of us; she kept us out of trouble and made a big impact on the black community. She became very famous later on but it started out with just us.”
Bowen went on to devote her life to the black feminist movement, working alongside prominent activists and scholars such as Audre Lorde. Later in life, she attained a PhD and spoke at universities and high-profile venues across the country, all the while retaining her passion for the arts as a mechanism for empowerment and liberation.
The ending credits of the biographical documentary, The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen, rolled over footage of Bowen recently singing “My Way” with a defiant tremble at a feminist organization in Pasadena.
Bowen’s legacy in New Haven is complicated by her decision to come out as a lesbian and move to Cambridge with her current partner Jennifer Abod, who also directed the film.
The panelists commended her for breaking social boundaries by leaving her black husband, also beloved by the community, and embracing her true identity as a lesbian woman — a move few at the time had the courage to do.
“She was that strong black woman in my life, a rock to me,” said Diane Brown, a former student and co-organizer of the event. “When she left us, we were really hurt and confused. But she gave so much of her life to us, it was important for her to do something for herself.”
Other former students at the event expressed mixed feelings about the terms on which she left New Haven. Jenkins said seeing the film and understanding the full context of her departure was “the first step in a healing process.”
Caldwell pushed back against this, saying that New Haven wasn’t ready to accept her for who she was, and that if anything, the community let her down — not the other way around. She said Bowen’s life and achievements, though rooted in her work with young New Haven dancers, had a much larger effect.
Aliyya Swaby contributed reporting.