Department of Dance

Dance Spectrum In Concert -- A Social Experiment in Care, Conflict, and Choreography

Possibilities abound in SHSU’s spring 2025 Dance Spectrum in Concert, a kaleidoscopic program of original dances choreographed by Sam Houston State University faculty and guest artists. Featuring work by Nicole von Arx, Travis Lake, Dionne Sparkman Noble, Adele Nickel, Jacob Regan, Kyle Rucker, and Tyler Orcutt, Spectrum traverses a landscape of love, longing, agitation, transmutation, effort, and absurdity. Get your tickets now for three opportunities to dive into a world of Rubik’s cubes, blindfolds, battling chickens, and a whole mess of virtuosic dancing -- May 1-3, 2025 at 8PM. 

Nicole von Arx’s Golden Hour traces the body’s memory of love, its shimmer and fragility, its ache and ascent. Rooted in personal reflections from the dancers, von Arx’s work captures the fleeting threshold where light and longing meet, when the body becomes both vessel and witness to something impossible to hold.

Set to a live cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” Travis Lake’s Mirror in the Sky explores themes of vulnerability, memory, and quiet resilience. Responding to the contours of the music, the virtuosic solo seeks to honor the delicate act of self-reflection while embracing the courage to let go and move forward.  

In Strange Bedfellows, alliances form and dissipate. Every action is consequential. The characters in Dionne Sparkman Noble’s quintet may be antagonists or co-conspirators; it’s enticingly hard to tell the difference. Sparkman-Noble asks: “Can a shared goal or circumstance lead to unexpected coalitions? And — when does opposition look very much like collaboration?" 

Loosely inspired by the deconstruction of a Rubik’s cube and inspired by a longstanding friendship with  Oklahoman-dance-nerd Brandin Steffensen, Adele Nickel’s Color Coding aims to push against habitual patterns of comparison. Through a series of compositional relationships, Nickel aims to render futile the natural temptation we all have to put each other in boxes.

A lone lightbulb drops an ensemble of blindfolded dancers into the depths of impulse, sensation, and sequence, in Jacob Regan’s Lit Flame Upon Still Water. Drawing on concepts from Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s book, Determined, the dance serves as an experiment in behavior under the assumption that, in Sapolsky’s words: “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment."

Kyle Rucker’s A Dissonant Arrival explores the contradiction of trying to find one’s unique character in the midst of a pre-existing environment. Pulsing with jumps, turns, falls, and impressive stops, the dance seethes with the tension of deciding whether to embrace the lone road ahead or to give in and relinquish oneself to the conformity of social expectation. 

You’re a chicken! (No, really, you are). While children on the playground may use this taunt to tease the more vulnerable, Tyler Orcutt realizes and embraces that there is a chicken in us all. Through two primary themes---FOMO (fear of missing out) and “fake it ‘til you make it”---Orcutt’s The Ordinary Results of Henry, The Chicken sends the audience out into the night with a hearty dose of camaraderie in the face of social anxiety, offering chance to laugh in the face of fear, if only for a moment. 

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Dance Spectrum in Concert will take place May 1-3, 2025, 8:00PM at the James and Nancy Gaertner Performing Arts Center, Montague Dance Theater, 815 17th Street, Huntsville, TX. 

Tickets are on sale now and may be purchased for $5 (SHSU students and children under 18) or $12 (faculty/ staff and general adult admission) at https://shsu.universitytickets.com/

For additional information, visit: https://events.shsu.edu/event/spring-2025-dance-spectrum-in-concert