02-25-2024 Harford Mag - Flipbook - Page 72
Watson on the set of“The
Color Purple.”The film was
directed by Blitz Bazawule,
staring Fantasia Barrino, Taraji
P. Henson, Danielle Brooks and
Colman Domingo.
As a student at Havre de Grace High School, Monique Watson (kneeling in center front) founded a dance
team that she said won a competition at Towson University. PHOTOS COURTEST OF MONIQUE WATSON
Europe last summer with the Weeknd’s tour.
“I don’t really like to define myself as a
particular style of mover,” Watson said. “I’m
just a dancer. I just move, and I move to what
moves me.”
In doing so, she’s lived up to what her Havre
de Grace High School classmates knew she
was destined for when they crowned her with
the superlative of most likely to be famous, she
recalled.
“I have done — in three years, insanely — all
the things that I wanted,” Watson said.
She took her first hip-hop class as a middle
schooler at Upper Chesapeake Summer Center
for the Arts at Washington College, which she
attended to play the viola.
Later, she was a cheerleader at Havre de Grace
High School, where she graduated in 2013, and
founded a dance team in 11th grade, coming
up with moves after school in the band room,
she said.
When the school’s decades-long band director
Richard Hauf sought her out to choreograph a
dance for the band to perform at a halftime show
during Watson’s senior year, it was because he’d
taken notice of her skill.
“Monique was just a born leader,” said Hauf,
53, who retired from Havre de Grace High
School last summer and now teaches at St.
Margaret School in Bel Air.
“You quickly noticed that she had an ability to
make those around her be better, in numerous
ways. … Her selflessness, her passion, it was
infectious. She really just stands out in a 30-year
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career.”
It was also in Maryland that Watson dove into
the world of musical theater, cast as one of “The
Dynamites” in a production of “Hairspray” at
the Community College of Baltimore County’s
Essex Campus as a high school student.
She’d only intended to dance when she
auditioned but got roped into singing, too.
“We didn’t know how talented she was,” said
her father, Arthur Watson.
His daughter was “so active” growing up,
Watson, 69, said. He initially took her interest
in movement for an inclination toward sports,
but after her performance in “Hairspray,” Watson
said her enthusiasm for dance “just spiraled.”
“Dance and theater was, I guess, in her blood,”
he said. “I guess it’s always been in her blood,
we just didn’t notice it. … I don’t even think she
saw it, until college.”
As a student at the University of Maryland,
Watson attempted a different path in the Air
Force ROTC. “It just was the trajectory that I
was supposed to go,” she recalled, noting her
two sisters’ involvement in the Air Force and
her father’s 20-year Army career.
“I don’t mind costumes, but I did not want
to wear a uniform every single day,” she said.
She kept dancing and directing for a team
called Phunktions and joined a team in
Washington, D.C. called Culture Shock before
dropping out of college early.
“Somehow the dance bug hit her again,”
Watson’s father said.
In her last two years working with Culture
