By Rachel Hackam

Shakia Barron’s The Gathering transforms the stage into a shared space of rhythm, improvisation, and release.

Kia The Key & Company,  The Gathering at The Dance Complex in Cambridge, 536 Massachusetts Avenue on June 20 at 8 p.m. and June 21 at 7 p.m.

Choreographer Shakia Barron. Photo: courtesy of the artist

For Shakia “The Key” Barron, dance came naturally. Barron grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, immersed in hip-hop culture.

“I have three brothers, one who was a DJ, one a graffiti artist, and the other an emcee,” Barron told me. “My parents listened to music throughout the house—Rhythm and Blues, R&B, gospel, soul, funk—everything was playing.”

Barron spent hours watching both the people around her come up with dances and VCR recordings of Michael Jackson performing “Smooth Criminal.”

“For some reason, people really loved learning my choreography,” Barron said. “We’d be outside with our boom box, having a blast, and I’d break down moves.”

Barron began her formal dance training through the Community Dance Enrichment Program. Her instructor noticed her interest and potential in hip-hop and asked her to teach a class, launching her choreography career at 16.

“I went to a performing arts high school and continued to train in the Western forms, but it just didn’t feel right,” Barron said. “I wanted to move freely and to vibe with people, so I continued to self-train and learn from my environment. I picked up on certain social dance moves and styles that we do at hip-hop parties.”

Barron spent time at both Jacob’s Pillow and the Bates Dance Festival. In 2024, she curated a hip-hop series for the season, featuring workshops, performances, and a dance battle.

While at the Bates Dance Festival as a teenager, Barron saw Rennie Harris Puremovement perform, inspiring her to transfer from Dean College to Temple University. While in Philadelphia, Barron danced with the company Face Da Phlave, where she earned her name “The Key.”

“My brothers in the company gave me the name. I had to battle all of them in order to get it,” Barron said. “My specialty is locking, and people call me Kia, so ‘The Key’ paired up nicely.”

Barron’s choreography draws on a variety of styles found in street dance and hip-hop. The Gathering is an original work that was made for an outdoor venue, and it celebrates the social elements of street dance.

“In street dance in particular, the proscenium stage is not ideal for what we do. It doesn’t feel good having that distance between the audience and the dancer. So trying to create a social environment while also being in a concert theater has been a task for me to figure out, both in terms of the feeling of being social and spatially,” Barron said.

Dancers in Kia The Key & Company in action. Photo: Shakia Barron

The performance features a live DJ, which creates opportunities for improvisation among the dancers. Barron weaves both movement and narrative into the evening’s performance to create an immersive experience for the audience.

“It feels so distant when everyone’s tuned in to their phones and electronics. The social aspect of what we do is the most important—it’s how these dance forms were created,” Barron said. “Street dance forms, and Black social dances, emerge from immense struggle and trauma—yet something always comes out of it: music and dance. This is a release for me and the dancers as well, a space where we can be free, let go, and move our bodies to the music.”

Rachel Hackam is a dance writer based in Boston. She graduated from Emerson College with a major in journalism and minors in dance and publishing.