Students Dance in Petros’ Pop Video

With strobe light flashing and techno music blaring, seven Harvard students dressed in skimpy clubwear raved in one corner of Lowell Dance Studio on Friday evening.

Gyrating in front of the studio’s mirrored wall, the dancers were filming the club scene of a music video for the song “Predator,” a pop sensation by Peter C. Shields, Jr. ’09.

For Shields, known as “Petros” in the Greek music world, this was his third music video and the second-ever to exclusively feature Harvard students. (He recruited the dancers, all friends, by e-mail.)

The filming took place in the dance studio, which a friend of Shields was able to reserve for the filming.

The studio was perfect, Shields said, because the mirrored wall made it seem like there were more dancers than were actually present.

In the pitch-black room, accents of white flashed as the dancing silhouettes moved around a passionately singing Shields. Occasionally, the camera stopped rolling as Shields took a moment to adjust the lighting or strobe light speed.

From behind the camera, Mary E. Birnbaum ’07, who directed the video, choreographed and positioned dancers. Birnbaum, who knew Shields from one of the many productions she directed during her time at Harvard, also directed his second music video, “Body Glow.”

Now a director in New York, Birnbaum described Shields’ music as “energetic and upbeat.”

Leticia R. C. Frazao, a friend of Birnbaum who graduated from Tufts last year and helped with the wardrobe for “Predator,” described Shields’ style as “technopop.”

“It’s really fun and energetic,” she said. “I run to this song.”

A performer from a young age, Shields, a Massachusetts native, first performed on the streets of Greece, where he spent his summers. In seventh grade, when he received his first video camera, he began filming.

“Film is my number one thing,” he said.

Shields wrote his first song for a senior project in high school, and in the ensuing summer he wrote and produced a music video for his first real song, “Afroditi.” Since then, Shields has released two CDs on iTunes.

An English concentrator, Shields said that a recurring theme in his songs is ambiguity.

“Ambiguity is the new explicitness,” he said.

But he noted that “Predator” is more straightforward than his other songs because it is his way of satirizing the creepy “predators” who victimize clean-cut clubbers.

In the future, Shields plans to enter the entertainment and media industry. And though he notes that “it’s a hard time to get into music now,” his friends said they have few doubts about his prospects.

“He has a huge amount of talent,” said Kate A. O’Donnell, ’09, a friend of Shields from middle school who stage-managed the music video. “He will do something really amazing.”