—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.