Culminations – In Barnstorm Programs, Artists Present Work a Lifetime in the Making

For each of the 2025-26 Dance Source Houston Artists in Residence, the past nine months of dance creation have been an opportunity to spend time with and flesh out essential parts of their lived experiences. For Andrew Smith, it is his experience as a queer man raised with Mexican and American concepts of masculinity. For Violet Moon, it is the multi-generational experience of dancing on pointe in ballet performance, and for Karmetra Shy, it is the value and definition of Black women’s experiences in broadly defined workspaces. Each experience can be said to be one of enculturation, and the artists do the self-affirming work of examining the expectations that raised them.

“Masculinity will always be a throughline in my work and a subject that I am interested in,” says Smith, discussing his piece Rules of Contact. “We always live in that [masculine/feminine] binary, but we can broaden and deconstruct the definitions.”

 “You’ll see two things: you’ll see this storyline about women from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different workplaces, different stages of life, how we all commune together, how we make our mark in the world individually and together,” Shy says of her piece, On the Shoulders Of, “And then there’s Black dance. House, jazz, influences of hip hop, woven into contemporary. I will be interested to see what the audience sees more of. I don’t know which one I am leaning toward. I feel like I have a pretty balanced view.”

“The work I ended up making feels like a culmination of all of the works that I’ve made since I returned to dance [following university studies].” Moon. “This piece feels like the intersection of my ancestral heritage and the sexual exploitation I’ve seen in ballet and the world, and being in a femme body historically, and what I’ve noticed in my maternal line. It feels very significant for me to get to tell this story.”

Both Moon and Shy reference their mothers’ experiences as a stimulus in their work. Moon’s mother is her original connection to French history and to the balletic rite of dancing and performing on pointe. For Shy, her mother’s perspective on work as an educator and caretaker in the home and community caused the artist to reexamine her own beliefs about women’s choices around work and the way their environment responds to those choices.  

The 2025-26 AIRs will share their works at Barnstorm Dance Fest, April 14-18, at Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston.

On the Shoulders Of by Karmetra Shy

“She doesn’t know that it’s very much centered around her, but I’ve been able to ask her, ‘Mom, how was it for you?’” says Shy. “My mom is a very strong person, and you don’t know if she’s struggling, so I never really understood how much of a toll it took on her to stay home until I got sick and had to stay at home and couldn’t work.”

While coming to terms with her own illnesses – which are recurrent and incurable, leaving her perpetually unsure how much dance her body can do each day – Shy discovered truths about her mother’s experience homeschooling eight children, raising them to have careers while she – they assumed – waited for the chance to fulfill her own professional aspirations. But Mama Shy wasn’t waiting for anything. In fact, she was offended by the assumption that she hadn’t been making her own clear-eyed decisions all along, choosing the work that she valued even while it was misrepresented as domestic obligation. She was finding her own spaces for release and refuge, unseen by her children.

Her mother’s story is part of a pattern of assumptions and misunderstandings that Shy addresses in her Barnstorm piece, titled On the Shoulders Of. Each of her dancers and Shy herself have had the experience where “someone will come up to me and say I’m too aggressive or it’s coming off as angry, when I just want to voice what I feel. So I have to adjust without losing myself. Everyone in the cast said they’ve had this happen. So now you’re questioning who you are as a person, and it makes you miserable because you don’t feel like yourself. So I’m pulling from all of these stories, from these experiences, and there is a moment in my piece where the women are very tired. It’s an exhaustion. They are tired of this, but they have to work, to provide.”

Shy brings considerable acting experience to her choreography, so that the movement and the characters she has created with her cast are equally telling the stories. “Dancers are good actors, but sometimes you have to pull it out of them. We talk about a story or I give them some background, now I need to see it in their body, but also on their face. And then I need them to think about the other people in the space, because house, hip hop, and jazz are very community-based. So while you are doing the moves and phrases that I ask for, how are you also connecting with your community on the stage and in the space?”

While the dancers embody experiences and emphasize community, Shy is also inspired by what each person brings to the work. “I work with each dancer individually and I use the movement that they like, that feels good on their body, to choreograph for them. I want to give them a moment to just feel really good, and they light up when it’s their turn because the dancing really is them.”

Shy’s choreographic process begins with these phrases, whether they originate with what feels good on the dancer’s body or what feels good to Shy herself. The music comes later, sometimes much later, but requires careful attention and comprehension. 

“My idea is that you can fit any type of movement to the music,” Shy explains. “The dance is in the music. So when my dancers know the steps, I ask how do you fill them out in the music? That is really important for house and jazz, and for the way I see movement. I want it to be seen like the music, like the movement is showing what the music is visually. I’m asking the dancers to let the music influence their movement. Really listen to the music and show me what you hear.”

While the music may not be house music, Shy is specific about the dance being authentically house dance. Most of her cast are experienced house dancers who spend summers training in New York City (“going to the source,” as Shy describes it) and who regularly session with teachers like Shy. She was legitimized to teach house by her own teachers in an apprentice-like system that keeps the character and elements of house dance authentic to its origins. It’s a style that can be found in clubs, at house parties, or “in a backyard where there could be a DJ or there could just be someone with their phone. And we’re sharing, and we’re drilling, and we’re training. The dancers I’m working with have a passion and a goal to preserve and share the culture.”

So does Shy. On the Shoulder’s Of comes out of her need to tell women’s stories and to showcase Black dance without sacrificing the spirit and authenticity of either aspect of her own experience and identity. Says Shy, “From my own experience and from how I would like to see myself and how I would like to present myself in the community of dancers, I want to make sure that I make dance in a way that holds true to me.”

As for presenting her work at Barnstorm, Shy’s motivation is to showcase and share a style that is rich and layered and deserves to be seen by the larger dance community. “I want [the community] to experience house and Black dance on the stage. I want to highlight the dancers who are professionals at this style, because it’s something that needs to be seen. I hope audiences are able to see that and gain insight from it.”

Insight can be gained by viewing On the Shoulders Of featuring dancers Giuliana Velez, Corinne Daniels, Mariah Lavallaise, Abi Ihurriago, and Kyla Shy in Barnstorm’s Program B, showing April 15th at 7:30 PM and April 18 at 5:00 PM. Shy also leads a workshop in House Foundations on April 16, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM at MATCH.

Touched by Violet Moon

For Moon, it isn’t the style of dance that is novel to the stage, but their use of an established form – dancing ballet on pointe – to hold a perspective that is both deeply personal and socially representative. “I don’t think that there’s representation about what people have to go through and how maddening it is to subject your body to so much suffering for the pleasure of others.”

“Why would I do it? That’s a question I’ve had throughout this entire process and my dance career in general, and something I’ve really struggled with.” Moon questions, and responds, “I think for anyone who’s been able to move and feel embodied and safe while moving, it’s one of the most special, euphoric, self-reclaiming experiences. Getting to dance just for you, to tell the stories of your body that don’t necessarily have words, you kind of take them back and process them in your own way.”

Comparing Touched to previous dance experiences, Moon says, “I think I didn’t like them because it felt like I was doing this other thing, trying to perform for the audience to communicate the story, versus approaching from the lens of ‘I’m going to do what I want, what feels good to me right here,’ because all of this research and story and context and cultural history exists within me. So I get to tell it. I’m so excited about it. It feels so exciting to tell this part of me instead of trying to tell other people’s stories.”

Touched is a solo piece intended to become part of an evening-length work that expands its themes of 19th-century Parisian cultural appetites for religious and artistic performance (and performance spaces), and the embodied histories and systems that satisfied those appetites. Looking at “the cultural markers of the time,” Moon identifies the Catholic Church and the Paris Opera (including the integral Paris Opera Ballet) as parallel institutions whose adherents are required to surrender bodily control, particularly control of the bodies of women and girls. “There’s this sort of parallel of your body not being your own, or abandoning the body for this larger entity that I’ve noticed as themes in both ballet and the church. There’s a sense of purity and simplicity, and with those come the undertone of sexual exploitation that was rampant. People in positions of power, or with enough funding, can kind of do whatever they want, whether they are hierarchical clergy or patrons of the ballet. The systems are oddly symmetrical.”

Moon contrasts the use and representation of women in ballet and Catholicism with the inferior position femininity held to masculinity in most of 19th-century French culture. While in other social spheres women were dependent on men and excluded from roles of power, in religious devotion or artistic pursuit, women could be “revered. The focus is on the feminine, and it’s celebrated. You’re floated through the air and all attention is on you. So there’s this divine feminine happening, but then also the exploitation of being watched and having to seduce, and where do those lines meet? In my piece, that’s the story that I want to tell. Where in the reverence does it become violence?”

The paradigm of masculine control of the feminine body preserves itself, insidiously, over and over, throughout time.

“I wanted to explore [a feminine-identifying person] trying to find refuge in the ballet, and that not happening. Then trying to find refuge in the church and reckoning that they’re the same. There’s actually nowhere to go. Then where does reclamation of self and the body come from? What do you do if there’s nowhere to go?” asks Moon. In 21st-century society, France and the European diaspora have built some institutions for the protection of women’s bodies, but both those bodies and institutions are constantly under threat. Moon states, “That’s why, in this piece, there’s not really a resolution. I don’t think it’s comforting, but it is representative.”

Spending the past nine months doing “all of the research that I’m embodying” and the physical labor of composing a solo on pointe is admittedly heavy work, and Moon, a clinical mental health professional, is aware of the toll such work can take on creative workers. “Toeing the line between it being burdensome and it being liberating is very tricky,” they acknowledge. “But also toeing the line of not retraumatizing yourself or triggering yourself. How do we express ourselves to the fullest without harm? There is a learning curve to finding your own internal limits.” 

It was necessary for Moon to spend the residency challenging both mental and physical limits. Being able to dance on pointe was essential to embody Paris Opera ideals and to represent religious sanctity, so Moon needed to “get comfortable enough on pointe that I didn’t hurt myself and I could still dance,” a task they accomplished by studying with Patty Obey at Houston Met Dance for seven months. As a literally elevated position, the epitome of balletic form, and an accomplishment reserved for elite dancers, being on pointe is a potent and multitudinous symbol that Moon continues to investigate. “I’m wondering what all being on pointe can hold,” they say. “It feels so vast that I’m almost losing language for it.” 

Besides the historic import and the familial identity of performing on stage on pointe – something Moon watched her mother do – part of Moon’s inspiration for creating and performing Touched comes from a moment both personal and relatable, a poignant motivation. “I remember seeing a Dance Salad when I was eighteen, when Dance Salad was still going on. I saw this ballet solo that was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was one of the core reasons I wanted to be a professional dancer, because it felt so honest and powerful. When I think about performing on stage, I think about that kid watching. That’s who I’m performing for.”

Let the cycle of inspiration continue by seeing Moon perform in Barnstorm’s Program C, April 16 and 18, 7:30 PM at MATCH. Moon’s workshop on Sustaining the Artist Self will be held April 18, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM.

Rules of Contact by Andrew Smith

Andrew Robert Smith admits he is “in a Say Yes phase,” making him a very busy multi-hyphenate. This dancer-choreographer-pilates instructor-MFA graduate-turned-SHSU faculty member committed to three performance showcases in the weeks leading up to the Barnstorm premier of Rules of Contact, not letting a nine-month-long residency and university teaching schedule deter him from sharing his choreographic work.

Having graduated from Sam Houston State University Department of Dance in 2025, Smith immediately reentered the department as faculty, and in his first year of teaching, contributed a contemporary dance piece for sixteen female dancers to the faculty show this spring. He then presented a portion of his twenty-five-minute MFA thesis, titled Deconstructing Adonis, at the sixth annual Latino/a/x Contemporary Dance Festival, and he and Hannah Joy Mettler are on the performance schedule for the 2026 Austin Dance Festival. Smith said he was excited to delve further into professional Houston and Texas dance milieus after achieving his MFA, and he is doing so with vigor.

The Dance Source Houston residency has provided time and space for Smith to continue to develop themes he investigated in Deconstructing Adonis and to widen his perceived audience as he created. “Deconstructing Adonis was made for queer-identifying people, while Rules of Contact is for a general audience,” Smith explains. Coming from a background in commercial dance, Smith’s MFA thesis dealt with a queer gaze on queer male-presenting bodies, investigating physical ideals and ramifications of surface identities. Rules of Contact moves Smith’s inquiry from the eye to the hand and examines acts of touch by men raised with North and Latin American social standards. 

“When men touch, it’s not lingering, and it’s always for a reason,” says Smith. Touch between men follows particular rules in order to be acceptable and manly.

Smith finds a codified definition of manliness in the Man Box concept, a series of behavior markers that, when used in a 2020 study of men over three nationalities, correlated high masculinity scores with a likelihood to commit acts of violence. 

Smith’s version of the Man Box comes from the original Brannon Masculinity Scale developed by social scientist Robert Brannon in 1976. It includes four Models of Masculinity, thematic ideals which are broken down into further examples of behavior deemed masculine. The models include

1. No Sissy Stuff – masculinity is the antithesis of femininity. Most of these behavioral markers have to do with suppressing the expression of emotions.
2. The Big Wheel – it is masculine to achieve high status or attributes of success. These can be in social, professional, athletic, or sexual arenas; basically, anywhere that one can be perceived as achieving a win.
3. The Sturdy Oak – men are independent/achieve independently. Masculine behaviors exhibit independence.
4. Give ‘Em Hell – aggression is masculine. This model is similar to The Big Wheel but idealizes combative behaviors as opposed to the merely competitive.

While this model doesn’t have the popularity it did among researchers and popular culture in past decades, it is undeniable that the prinicples echo with striking resonance today. These four tenets can still be found in formal and informal education of males, as well as on playgrounds and CEO suites. Smith also refers to Ocean Vuong’s 2019 essay “Reimagining Masculinity” as a further example of commonplace phrases equating violence – and violent touch – with manhood. On stage at Barnstorm, Smith will ask how these metaphors impact man-to-man touch in the Rules of Contact. 

The appropriateness of touch has its own rules in the dance studio, making dance a special place for examining touch and for experiencing it. Smith’s investigations and provocations are hindered by an undeniable fact of the dance studio: “One of my problems in making dance is finding enough men,” Smith laments. Remember that he used sixteen female dancers in the faculty showcase, but could such a substantial cast be replicated with male dancers, even in a program as robust as that of SHSU?

Nonetheless, it is the university that has provided the relationships with male dancers Smith used to create Rules of Contact. Deontay Gray is an MFA candidate at SHSU and a professional dancer with a commercial dance background similar to Smith’s own journey to concert dance. Cole Hinson is an emerging professional dancer in the BFA program, and both Deconstructiong Adonis and Rules of Engagement were set on Gray and Hinson. Smith himself rounds out the trio that will perform at Barnstorm. “I knew my residency piece was going to be a trio,” says Smith. “It started with the duet [from Deconstructing Adonis] and which has changed so much over time. Rules of Contact is mostly my voice, but my dancers can say, ‘Yes, but what about this,’ or I can say, ‘I’m envisioning this,’ and they can say, ‘This is how it feels on my body.’ But this work always goes back to my research. It always goes back to The Man Box.”

Smith hopes that he has used the resources of the Dance Source Houston residency to “push myself as an artist and as a dancemaker,” and he hopes that when audiences see the work, “I hope they have a curiosity in it. My favorite dances don’t have an easy answer, an easy meaning. I hope my audience is left inspired and curious.”

Bring your curiosity to Rules of Contact in Barnstorm Program A, April 14 and 17, 7:30 PM at MATCH, and consider attending Smith’s Contemporary Partnering Lab on April 17, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM.