By Barrett White
In 2019, Good Morning America found itself embroiled in a scandal after co-host Laura Spencer appeared to mock the United Kingdom’s Prince George for taking ballet classes. That stigma—the notion of what boys should or shouldn’t do—is all too familiar to Houston-based dancer Otis Berry, who works to extinguish it with every kick.
As a child, Berry took a hip-hop course with an instructor named Marcus. “I’ll never forget it,” he recalls. “He was another tall Black man like myself, and it was the first time I’d related to a dancer. Up until then, all the dancers I’d seen were Latin or white . . . I remember thinking, ‘I want to be better than him.’”
Berry studied dance on his own, honing his talents by watching VHS tapes, YouTube videos, and by wearing out his DVD of FAME in an attempt to perfectly recreate a move that he found absolutely captivating. And by the time he hit high school, he was hungry for skill and training.
It was Mrs. Beall, a dance teacher at Aldine ISD’s Eisenhower High School, who helped to foster Berry’s burgeoning passion for dance. “I spent my entire day in the dance room,” Berry says. “Mrs. Beall was the most influential person in my life. She told me, ‘You can dance. You’re a guy, you’re six-foot-two—now six-foot-eight—your feet are bad, but your legs are amazing.’”
She was right.
“Mrs. Beall was relentless in her efforts,” Berry says. And by the time he’d been under her wing for a year, she pushed him to audition for the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center. He was accepted and, over time, he also danced for NobleMotion, appeared at various art shows across the city, and starred in an Urban Souls performance by renowned Houston dancer Harrison Homer-Guy titled Between Two Worlds. Berry’s tone goes reverent while he describes the show as an understanding and exploration of a gay Black man’s space, which took place over multiple venues.
Now back in Houston after his time at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Berry has turned his attention to not only keeping his own dance muscles working, but developing those of the next generation by teaching dance and color guard for Houston-area high schools. His goal is to open his own dance studio soon, and to develop it into a convention that brings together students and teachers alike, not unlike Artists Simply Human. “I want to change the world with dance,” he says.
Reflecting on his students, himself, and the stigma that follows male dancers, Berry is unfazed. “Masculinity sucks,” he says. “I’ve had students removed from [my] class because, ‘I don’t want my boy to be a sissy.’ We’ve got to break that stigma. Not all boys want to play football; to build a house. With my students, I’m not telling you to be masculine. I’m asking you to be strong. To give me a strong performance.”
