Behind The Scenes With Mind The Gap 39
Dance Source Houston will present the final Mind The Gap performance of the 2025-2026 season on May 19 at MATCH. We asked the choreographers about the works they’re sharing – about the impetus, the process, what they want audiences to know, and why the’re sharing it at Mind The Gap.
Learn more about the 6 works featured on the program directly from the dancemakers and get your tickets at matchouston.org/events/2026/mind-gap-xxxix.
Brittany Bass – “ˈef-ərt-fəl”
“This choreographic work centers the body as a site of lived experience, memory, and relationship. I am interested in how effort, adaptation, and care emerge over time, and how what once felt easy becomes something we must renegotiate. I draw from personal narrative while creating space for performers to bring their own histories into the work. Ultimately, my work invites presence, reflection, and an honest witnessing of the body as it is now.
The impetus for this work comes from an ongoing curiosity about how the body holds experience over time. I am motivated by personal reflection, observation of everyday movement, and questions around resilience, care, and being seen. This work emerges from a desire to slow down, listen to the body, and translate lived moments into movement.
I value the opportunity to present in a context that prioritizes experimentation, accessibility, and dialogue. Sharing this work through Mind The Gap allows me to test ideas in front of a live audience while remaining in an iterative creative process.”
Shelby Craze – “Continuum: What Remains“
“My work imagines the body as a vessel and the vessel as a body. The line between internal and external is blurred, perhaps erased, and bodies emerge, converge, resist, and persist onward. This piece combines movement, fiber sculpture, and physically expressed emotion to create a beautifully visceral work.
This piece is an extension of a solo piece I created in May 2025 called “Evolving Somatic Persistence”. The elements are the same – body, fibrous vessel, and resistance/persistence – but the bodies have doubled for this piece. This duet will explore the push and pull within the cocoon that cannot be explored by a single body, but only when two converge within a confined but expanding space. I want people to feel and witness the struggle that occurs when the very vessel that nurtures and protects you can also be a space of confinement and strain.
I have spent several years attending Mind The Gap, once participating in a performance by another choreographer, and I’m ready to show my own work as part of the series. It has been an inspiration to me to see the diversity in work that Mind The Gap displays, and I’m honored to be a part of it.”
Jessie Ferguson (BOOT Dance Project) – “Before It Falls“
“This trio explores the invisible labor of carrying responsibility before it is asked, inspired by the experience of being the one who holds things together. Through shifting weight, interruption, and near-collapse, the dancers navigate the space between care and obligation. The work lingers in moments of hesitation, when support is expected but not acknowledged.
The impetus for creating this work comes from a personal experience of carrying responsibility before it is named, particularly through the lens of being the oldest daughter. The work is driven by an interest in how care, love, and obligation quietly intertwine, and how that weight accumulates over time.
Being part of a long-standing platform like Mind The Gap also strengthens our presence within the broader Houston dance ecosystem and creates meaningful connections with fellow local artists. The program’s emphasis on production support, documentation, and shared resources directly supports BOOT as an organization.”
Deontay Gray – “Untitled“
“This work was created for a composition assignment for grad school. It was a mini-thesis project that revolves around self-censorship, a topic that I feel strongly about. It is an embodiment of true honesty. It is about a topic that we all have to navigate daily. A topic that can easily become very political, but is presented in a way that allows the audience to feel close to the dancers and their story.
When I was creating the piece, one thing that was important to me was creating an environment where the dancers did not feel that they had to self-censor. Both as dancers in the space working with a choreographer and as movers doing the movement. I wanted them to be able to explore a part of themselves throughout, and it feels genuine.”
Adele Nickel + Kyle Rucker – “Exit Stage Left“
“This work is the first iteration of a new collaboration between dancer/choreographer (Adele) and lighting/production designer (Kyle). It marries live performance and video projection to prompt such questions as: When does “movement,” a fundamentally defining feature of life, become something we start to call “dance”? Who decides where and when this boundary is prescribed? And what might this line of questioning reveal about our collective assumptions about what constitutes dance, or beauty, or art?
Over the last several years, I’ve developed a side passion project of making short video “dances” almost entirely devoid of the human form–instead featuring natural lifeforms such as grass, flowers, and water (and some unsuspecting inanimate co-stars like flags and cars).
These videos have served secondarily as a record of my thinking and feeling over a period of transitional time: from my professional performing life in NYC, to the Pacific Northwest for graduate school, and to rural Texas, where I took a job sight unseen, only to shortly thereafter find myself weathering a global pandemic. Along the way, I’ve found myself wondering: by what and whose metrics do we draw the distinction between movement and “dance”? I’m far from the first person to ask this question, but this work poses my first inklings of a response.”
Lori Yuill (TerraForm(ed) Collective) – “Nature Stories“
“Nature Stories” uses dance and individual stories as a way to understand the value of protecting local ecology. Dancers in this work share moments of joy and connection to nature. These stories are woven together through improvisational scores and a shared movement practice.
The TerraForm(Ed) Collective has a practice of developing dance ideas and adapting them to different spaces and events. In this case, we are adapting a dance that was made outside to the stage.
The first version of Nature Stories was created in conjunction with National Water Dance. Across the nation, different groups brought attention to the fragility of our waters and moved with one voice for responsible stewardship of our Earth. This version will continue to work with nature stories exploring the individual and collective connection to nature.”
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