About this Event
About the performance:
The Gathering is an evening length performance experience that brings communities together through the joy, power, and history of Street and Club dance. Weaving live DJ sets, poetry, storytelling, and movement, the work creates an immersive environment where rhythm, memory, and shared presence take center stage.
Rooted in African Diasporic social dance traditions, The Gathering honors the cultural spaces where these forms were born, including family gatherings, clubs, parks, basements, basketball courts, and outdoor cyphers. For this performance, the Julie Ince Thompson theater is intentionally reimagined as a communal space, cultivating the same energy, freedom, and connection found in those original gathering places. The audience is not just watching; they are part of the exchange.
Created in collaboration with professional dance artists from New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, the work reflects intergenerational knowledge, lived experience, and collective joy. Inspired by the artist’s upbringing immersed in Hip-Hop culture in Springfield, Massachusetts, The Gathering invites audiences into a personal and communal journey through American social dance shaped by resilience, creativity, and celebration. It creates space for dancers, non-dancers, and community members to connect across differences, feel with one another, and recognize shared humanity through a celebration of community, belonging, and joy.
About Kia the Key & Company:
Established in 2022, is a project-based dance company and one of the primary spaces where Shakia “The Key” Barron develops and shares choreographic research. Based in Western Massachusetts, the company is grounded in Street and Club dances. Through this work, Shakia explores how these forms carry cultural memory, communal wisdom, and embodied knowledge that is deeply connected to the African Diaspora. The company brings together a diverse group of dancers across race, nationality, and background. Working with dancers that reflect a wide range of lived experiences and diversity deeply informs the company’s creative process and stories told.
This company is not just about making performances, it’s about asking questions, building relationships, and creating opportunities to engage with the complexity and beauty of Black social dance. Each project serves as a way for Shakia to investigate how these movement practices function as cultural expression, political resistance, and modes of collective healing. The process is collaborative, community centered, and rooted in a commitment to honoring the history and legacy of the forms.
Shakia “The Key” Barron is an accomplished choreographer, performer, and educator specializing in African Diasporic Street and Club dance forms, with a focus on Hip-Hop, House, and Funk styles. She is the Class of 1929 Dr. Virginia Apgar Assistant Professor of Dance at Mount Holyoke College and the Artistic Director of Kia The Key & Company.
Shakia has choreographed and directed over 70 works presented at colleges, festivals, and renowned dance institutions including Bates Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow. As a performer, Barron has toured nationally and internationally with Face Da Phlave Entertainment, Illstyle and Peace Productions, and Rennie Harris Puremovement, and has shared stages with major Hip-Hop artists and NBA halftime productions.
About the performance space:
The Julie Ince Thompson Theatre (Studio 1) and pre/post-show reception space (Studio 7) are ADA compliant. There is a motorized lift that can bring one person at a time from the ground floor to the theater. There is no elevator. There are handicap accessible restrooms on both floors.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Dance Complex, 536 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, United States
USD 33.85
