Allan Appel Photo
Is this any way to get the bus to stop for you? It is if you’re Elaine Peters with her Coco Carribe dance troupe and you’re performing as part of fourth season of “Exact Change,” a series of live performances on New Haven’s bus routes that unfolded with calypso, Afro-Latin, and kompa musical beats Saturday afternoon.
Gloria and Ryan Baker
Bearing drums, limbo sticks, rain sticks, maracas, and tambourines, the group boarded the B4 bus at Whalley and Fitch and conga-ed to to the rear. The Arts Council organizes “Exact Change” to send local artists onto buses once a year to enliven the ride.
Click on the play arrow to check out the troupe’s first improvisational number, which rocked the bus roughly between Osborne and the Boulevard. Its main lyric is “Carnival not over, no, no, don’t stop the carnival.”
There had been a sudden heavy shower; the bus was relatively crowded. The startled riders slowly began to clap and tap along with the participatory music.
One frequent rider of the B4, Roger Pickett, lowered the hood of his sweatshirt the better to hear. “I like them. They should be on every bus,” was his review.
Peters is in the proud tradition of her parents, who opened the Bowen-Peters dance studio on Dixwell Avenue, the first such African-American owned establishment in New Haven.
Swaying in broad white skirts and with a colorful turban, Peters set the beat, and her group followed: Kevin DeShields (congas), Gloria Baker (tambourine) and Ryan Baker (drums) and dancer Donte Hall.
At Orchard, the group began to get larger as passengers to the left and right of the performers were handed marraccas and, in Oliver Murphy’s case, a cowbell to keep the beat.
While they played, Murphy and Peters had a rhythmic reminiscence of the years they spent together at Lee High School in the early 1970s.
He said she performed at the school. Peters denied it. “You did.” She still denied it.
By the time the bus arrived at Broadway, headed for the Green, the issue had been cleared up: The school Peters had performed at was not the high school but her parents’ dance school.
My mother wouldn’t let me perform at Lee, said Peters, because the boys would look up our skirts.
Oliver Murphy
Murphy said he was a basketball player and would not stand to be so accused. “I looked at my basketball,” he said.
Another bus rider got on at Orchard bearing a plant. As he sat down next to Peters, he confirmed that Angela Bowen was strict. He said he ought to know. He attended the school.
As the bus passed beyond York, Peters provided Murphy a little instruction on how to hold the cowbell, and they slid into their last rousing number. The lyrics don’t do justice to the get-out-of-your seat rhythms, especially on a moving bus where you can’t do that: “Carnival is over, we got to go.”
Other groups performing on different routes for Exact Change were: Silk n’ Sounds barbershop quartet; mime ShareceSellem of Artistik Expressions; spoken word artist Trishi Shuler, and the Hillhouse Opera Company.
Click here for last year’s story of the latter company singing Mozart and Pucini on the Grand Avenue D bus.