Department of Dance

Mirrors, Yarn and Battle Buddies
2025 MFA Dance Candidates in Concert

This February 6-8, join the Sam Houston State University Department of Dance at 8:00PM in the GPAC Montague Dance Theater at 8 PM nightly to celebrate Andrew Robert Smith (Feb 6 & 8), Sheena Kapila (Feb 6 & 7), and Jennifer Passios (Feb 7 & 8 ) as they premiere their thesis concerts, the culminating choreographic projects reflecting three years of study at SHSU. 

Andrew Robert Smith’s Deconstructing Adonis serves as a retrospective on masculinity, identity, and the aesthetic pressures placed on male-presenting people. Featuring an all male cast, the dance chisels away a cultural veneer of dominance, strength, and physical perfection down to the vulnerable layers of shame, fear, and disconnection that may hide below. Using mirrors to reshape and reflect relationships between the dancers and their environment, Deconstructing Adonis resists stoicism in favor of intimacy reclaiming manhood as something beautiful, tender, and true. 

Throughout EVERST, Sheena Kapila invites cast and audience members alike to consider what it means to receive and perceive oneself bravely and authentically. Drawing on the Meisner Technique, an acting method that uses improvisation and repetition to lead practitioners into emotionally rich performance worlds, Kapila and her cast hone in on endurance, improvisation, and impulse in service of lush dancing and group support. Kapila describes her work as a run on sentence, a dance that reflects the continuity of life and the many ways that a strong community can help the individual survive their own battles. EVERST, a portmanteau of ‘forever first’ reminds performers and viewers alike of the common experiences shared among all people. With open arms, Kapila welcomes audiences to ask -- what does it mean to put oneself first -- no matter how hard that challenge might feel? 

Things aren’t always what they seem in Jennifer Passios’s  it’s from here that the world unfolds. Beginning with a lone, scissor-wielding figure spinning in a chair, the dance moves from oddity to oddity transporting viewers through a place at once domestic and surreal. Hints of home -- chairs, a table, books, garbage, yarn --  appear, disappear, and occasionally descend from the ceiling. In an eddy of people, props, and storytelling, this feminine fever dream plays with how attention changes when everyday objects suddenly shape shift into agents of action. 

The thesis split bill will take place February 6-8 2025 at 8:00PM  in the James and Nancy Gaertner Performing Arts Center, Montague Dance Theater, 815 17th Street, Huntsville, TX. Each program will featuring two of the three thesis projects: 

Thursday, February 6 - Deconstructing Adonis + EVERST; 

Friday, February 7 - EVERST + it’s from here that the world unfolds; 

Saturday, February 8 -  it’s from here that the world unfolds +  Deconstructing Adonis. 

Admission is free and open to the public, seating first come, first serve.