Olympic Art

Daniel A. Cozzens ’03

From common casting his first-year fall to his unopposed election as president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC), Daniel A. Cozzens ’03 says he can’t stress enough how wonderful his experience has been with the arts at Harvard.

“I think the drama community especially is very open,” he says. “I’ve grown to love it.”

At Arts First, Cozzens will receive the Louise Donovan Award, which recognizes outstanding work behind the scenes in the arts. Since his first year at Harvard, he says he’s discovered theater in everything he does—even in biological anthropology, his concentration.

“There’s a similar investigation into what makes us human, and what types of things are common to mankind,” he says.

In high school, Cozzens participated in some theatrical productions and performed in several small ensemble parts when he first arrived at Harvard. But he says he felt “very sort of unfulfilled in the other aspects of my life.” Academics did not interest him as much as he had hoped, he says, so instead he turned to theater and decided to begin taking on more responsibility.

Cozzens joined the HRDC and began working behind the scenes.

“This community had become a large part of me and who I was at Harvard, and I wanted to help it,” he says.

He says he loved the enthusiasm and new ideas the members brought with them.

“Undergraduate theater at Harvard is very self-propelled, very entrepreneurial,” he says. “Basically everything is on you, and that spirit was really exciting.”

In the fall of his junior year, he was elected president of HRDC.

Cozzens has also been heavily involved with the Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theater (HRST), and in 2002 directed a successful production of Macbeth in the courtyard of Hilles Library.

“Macbeth brought together a lot of that excitement in the face of what on the surface seemed like insurmountable odds,” he says. “It was a very transformative event for that space and for me.”

Cozzens says has no concrete plans for the future, but he says he’ll continue to engage in theater in some way.

“Performance is everywhere and has always been everywhere from the beginning of time,” he says.

—Jayme J. Herschkopf

Shelby L. Braxton-Brooks ’03

Shelby J. Braxton-Brooks ’03 says she does not like to be labeled—even when it’s for a prestigious award like the Radcliffe Cohen Levi Prize, which honors a student who “combines talent and energy with outstanding enthusiasm for musical theater.”

Braxton-Brooks begs to differ.

“My work is much more interdisciplinary,” she says.

In addition to appearing in numerous theater productions, she has also choreographed and directed, and is a member of the Kuumba Singers and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company.

Braxton-Brooks says her passion for theater began with what she calls “little shows” she put on with her friends when she was younger.

“Everybody does it when they’re kids,” she says. “We just…didn’t stop.”

This year, that work has reached its culmination. After she created her own special concentration in performance studies two years ago, Braxton-Brooks presented her performance thesis, The House that Ansiedade Built, in the Loeb Experimental Theater in March. The interdisciplinary dance-and-acting show treated tourist perceptions of Brazilian society.

Braxton-Brooks traveled to Brazil in the summer to study the samba and capoeira techniques that appear in the show. She says creating it was one of her most rewarding and challenging experiences to date.

“I had this statement I wanted to make in a very visceral way and to have that evaluated as academic is very difficult,” she says. “It’s the project I’ve worked on the longest, the one I probably lost the most sleep over.”

Braxton-Brooks says she did not always receive much support from her classmates, some of whom doubted the rigorousness of a performance thesis.

“I was asked the most insulting questions by my classmates,” she says.

While she stresses that her thesis was just as difficult—“if not more”—than its written counterparts, she says that in one sense she is more fortunate.

“I got to present it in a form that I love,” she says.

Braxton-Brooks says she is unsure about her plans for next year.

“I feel that my thesis is just winding down,” she says. “It’s like the project that never ends.”

But whatever the future may bring, she says it will include theater.

“I’ve realized that this is what I want to make life and my career,” she says.

—Jayme J. Herschkopf

Hazel D. Davis ’03

Music runs in the blood of Hazel D. Davis ’03, one of this year’s recipients of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts “in recognition of her extraordinary musicianship.”

“My mom was a horn player through college,” she says. “So I decided to play it and follow in her footsteps.”

Davis has spent her years at Harvard immersed in music. She is a full-time member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and the Bach Symphony Orchestra (BSO), and occasionally performs with other groups. She says her most rewarding performance was the Britten Serenade—a piece written for solo horn and voice—with the BSO in 2001.

Davis’s musical career began when she received her first horn in fifth grade. But finding a teacher was difficult for the budding musician.

“My school had a pitiful little band program,” she says.

No horn instruction was offered, so she says she “listed porn and horn” on her instrument request sheet. The school decided to allow her to take lessons “with one other girl in a walk-in closet” until she reached a more accommodating department in junior high.

At Harvard, Davis says she quickly found her place.

“There’s a really tight group of really committed musicians,” she says.

She says she appreciates the support from her companions as well.

“Orchestral music here is not competitive like it is at a conservatory,” she says.

Apart from her concentration requirements for biological and social anthropology, Davis spends almost all her time in music classes. She has taken Music 180r: “Performance and Analysis: Seminar” three times, and calls it her favorite: “The people who play in that class are such incredible musicians, such a joy to listen to.”

As for Music 93r: “Supervised Reading and Research,” “a chamber music class you can take over and over again,” she’s on semester number seven.

Still, Davis says she has some complaints about the lack of resources for those in her situation.

“There are no instrumental teachers here,” she says.

She takes lessons from James Somerville, the principal horn in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But private lessons are expensive, and she says with all her other musical commitments there’s no time for a job. She says the OFA offers a yearly $200 grant for such costs, “but I’ve applied for it every year and still haven’t gotten it.”

Davis says she’s thrilled to receive the Sudler Prize. She says she’s honored that her devotion to music has been recognized, but adds that “any of my senior colleagues in the music department deserve it just as much.” As for the $1,000 cash prize, “it’s going to my lessons,” she says with a laugh.

Davis is still planning for next year. She’s been extremely busy with concerts and auditions: “Auditions were my thesis.” She has over ten concerts in the next three weeks alone.

Davis was originally unsure about whether to attend university or a conservatory.

“I knew I wanted to play professionally,” she says, “but how could I turn Harvard down?”

She eventually decided she didn’t want to limit herself solely to music. Four years later, she says, “it’s the best decision I ever made.”

—Jayme J. Herschkopf

Elizabeth A. Little ’03

Elizabeth A. Little ’03 is making skulls. Hundreds of skulls.

“We don’t have the money to buy them,” she explains. “But the [American Repertory Theater (ART)] did leave us plenty of chemical foam.”

The molded foam skulls are to be mounted on wood frames.

“They’re actually sewage pipes, but we’re doing our darndest to make them look like wood,” Little says. The skulls form part of the backdrop for the main stage production of Richard III, which opened last weekend.

Little is one of this year’s recipients of the Louise Donovan Award, which recognizes students who have done outstanding work “behind the scenes” in the arts.

But Little, who estimates that she’s worked on at least 20 Harvard shows, hasn’t always been backstage. She acted in high school and during her first year.

But in her first-year spring, she was offered a producer’s role, which she says suited her perfectly. Little has worked on shows as both producer and set designer.

“Set design is my true love,” she says. “I was always the nerdy little kid who liked to design houses in her spare time.”

In the meantime, Little finds plenty of work to fill her 12-plus-hour days in the prop room, where she paints sets and cuts foam.

“I’m practically living here,” she says. “There are not a lot of technical theater people on campus.”

Despite her harried schedule, Little says she finds the theater to be a wonderfully relaxing way to get away from academics.

“Focusing lights is so much fun,” she says. “[It’s] a great antidote to academic work…You get to work with your hands.”

Little’s dedication to her craft shows through in her paint-splattered clothes and her habit of occasionally bringing wrenches and drill bits home by accident. Once she even wore a pair of safety goggles out of the theater without noticing it.

Little says she enjoys the collaborative nature of theater to balance the solitary research she does for her social studies concentration. But academics have won out—after a three-month stint in summer theater at the ART, Little will attend the University of California at San Diego next fall for her doctorate in political science.

But until then, skulls await. They’re a bit macabre, Little acknowledges, but they will look great.

“The designer’s goal is to take something unexpected and reveal something beautiful in it,” she says.

—Alexandra D. Hoffer

R. Pacho Velez ’03

Roberto Pacho Velez ’03 has also been awarded the Louis Sudler Prize, which recognizes his achievements in documentary filmmaking. His work has been screened at national and international film festivals. These films include Occupation, an film about the living wage campaign at Harvard, and Orphans of Mathare, which received the Rosa Luxembourg Prize for Humanitarian Filmmaking. Velez declined to be interviewed by The Crimson.