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Leveling Up with Gregory Robinson
254 Plays1 year ago
Season One, Episode Two: This month's guest is "Dayton Gem" Gregory Robinson. Robinson received his dance training at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. His career as a performer, teacher, ballet master, and choreographer, primarily with Dayton Ballet, in Dayton, Ohio, has spanned more than thirty years. He was named a "Dayton Gem" by the Dayton Daily News. His works have garnered critical praise and funding from regional and national arts agencies including MCACD, Culture Works, the H. Robert Magee foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
OhioDance A State of Dance is a six-part series coming out the fourth Friday of each month through November 2023.
This podcast is driven by the OhioDance mission to secure the foothold of dance in Ohio through increasing visibility, firming viability, and elevating the position of dance in Ohio.
In 2016, a five-person team set out on a mission to capture the achievements of persons and institutions who have shaped the intricate diversity of dance history and practice within the state of Ohio and weave them together in an easily accessible digital format. This we call the OhioDance Virtual Dance Collection. As of 2023 we have highlighted 33 individuals and institutions. The team has traveled over 5000 miles and interviewed 100 individuals in all five regions of Ohio. In this second episode we interviewed Gregory Robinson, a performer, teacher, ballet master, and choreographer, with Dayton Ballet. vdc.ohiodance.org
If you like what you are listening to and are not a member of OhioDance, you can go to ohiodance.org and click the membership button to join and receive the many benefits that come with your membership. You can also donate through our purple donate button.
OhioDance would like to thank our funders: Ohio Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, The Ohio State University Dance Preservation Fund, The Greater Columbus Arts Council, Columbus Foundation and Akron Community Fund.
Host: Rodney Veal
Executive Producer: Jane D’Angelo
Editor and Audio Technician: Jessica Cavender
Music Composition: Matthew Peyton Dixon
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Transcript
Introduction and Gregory Robinson's Background
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to a State of Dance, sponsored by Ohio Dance and hosted by independent choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Rodney Veal.
00:00:25
Speaker
So today I would like to welcome our guest, Gregory Robinson. Gregory is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and award winner who lives and works in Dayton, Ohio, which is my hometown. So I'm just going to be fanboying out here a little bit. There's legendary status going on in this conversation. And it's not on my end, it's on Greg's
Dance Education and Mentorship
00:00:48
Speaker
end. So Greg, thank you for joining us today. Rodney, I'm so glad to be here today. Thank you for having me.
00:00:53
Speaker
This is kind of like, this is your life where we kind of dive into all the things that become that, that led to you becoming legendary.
00:01:04
Speaker
audience we go way back. We do way back. Greg you studied at the University of Alabama and you were the first man in the department and I'm curious about that and the first black man and that's correct correct. Yes this is the University of Alabama the main campus in Tuscaloosa 1970. 1970 okay all right so when you were dancing at the University of Alabama Stuart Sebastian who was the
00:01:30
Speaker
Who was then, was the Artistic Director of Dayton Valley at that point? No, he wasn't. That I knew of. But he, we met within a year and a half of him being appointed director. Awesome. And so were you brought into the company to be a choreographer or was it Stuart or was it just? At that time, so I had my first year of training at the main campus in Tuscaloosa University of Alabama.
00:01:56
Speaker
I had two teachers then. One was Lou Wall, tall, elegant, gram trained. The other teacher was Phoebe Barr, small, esoteric, a former Dineshaun dancer. So I got from the two of them right away. In my first class, Lou asked me how many years I had been dancing. And when I said about 20 minutes, she said, you need to see me after this class.
00:02:25
Speaker
That could be good or bad. 20 minutes, like 20 minutes. I know. I was so naive, but no. Because I had a lot of musical training, I studied to be a musician. That was my dream. Oh, OK. And dance was, my interest in dance came from the fact that I thought I couldn't do it. I had no physical nature as a kid. I would lock myself in a room and practice my clarinet for hours on it.
00:02:49
Speaker
You know, outside of playing games out in the street, baseball or whatever, I didn't have like a big physical nature. I was very cerebral to me as a kid. So the point of starting this idea of dancing was to understand more what a musician would have to do in the pit to support dancers on stage. That was my end. And the class was an elective and I needed a phys ed something for that first year.
00:03:16
Speaker
And my friend Terry Denise Points, who danced in Birmingham in one of the first integrated modern companies in Birmingham, she suggested that I take this class because she was tired of answering my questions.
00:03:30
Speaker
and me shadowing her when she would let me into rehearsal. So that's how that started. And so Lou and Phoebe got me through my first year. Training was as rigorous as Graham could be, but Phoebe was able to take that spiritual side that I think really got me toward an artistic look at what dance could be at that point.
00:03:50
Speaker
The next year, I moved back to Birmingham and UAB, University of Alabama in Birmingham, had just started a dance program full on, not an elective. Full on, just. Within the theater department. Like this is going to be a degree program. Right. It was a dance concentration within the theater department, which had not happened before.
00:04:11
Speaker
The Birmingham had a huge ballet history already and there was an established company just like in Dayton. There was the Dayton Civic Ballet in Birmingham. There was the Birmingham Civic Ballet. I remember seeing some of their performances and to this day I'm still in touch with some of those dancers that inspired me before I even knew what ballet was going to do to my life.
00:04:33
Speaker
So at 71, I started at UAB in that dance concentration. The teachers there were a married couple at the time, Stefan Grebel and Melanie Mihalik. They were my teachers for the next 10 years. And what I didn't know, they helped me find out so quickly. They were so supportive of what I was bringing, whatever wildness
International Experiences and Returning Home
00:04:59
Speaker
that was, untrained wildness. They guided me.
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, it was everything I could have asked for from a teacher as far as that kind of relationship. Never harsh, but always truthful because I wanted to know the deal. And starting when I did at 18 and not thinking even then that this was going to be what I've been doing for the next 50 years, the education they gave me was phenomenal.
00:05:27
Speaker
Stefan Grebel had danced with the National Ballet, which became the Washington Ballet. And while he was at the National Ballet, his directors were Ben Stevenson, famous of Houston Ballet, and Frederick Franklin,
00:05:42
Speaker
famous of the Ballet Roos. There's a documentary that he's pretty much the star of about the Ballet Roos. This man, I knew about just from reading about him. We didn't see very many films of him dancing, but everything I could find out about him I did. Phenomenal presence, a Nuryev of his time in English Ballet, actor-dancer, dancer-actor, he could do it all.
00:06:07
Speaker
And at his age, in his 60s, he knew everything. He came and set several ballets on us, some full lengths, some 1X. And just to have someone of that global stature drop into Birmingham, Alabama, dealing with college students as if we were seasoned professionals.
00:06:29
Speaker
And he set everything without a piece of paper. He set Giselle front to back, never looking at a note. And he knew what the kid up in the corner was supposed to be doing, the super, as well as what the principals were doing.
00:06:44
Speaker
That is astounding. So here's this person that I knew was a dance god. He was so loving. He would dance you to your knees, but you had a smile on your face because his passion was so broad and his spirit was so amplified to help you get through this.
00:07:04
Speaker
I'll never forget those instances. He was one of the highlights in Birmingham at that time, but we were doing like Petrushka and Serenade and Capella every year. For 10 years, we did a Nutcracker. We did works by Lou Christiansen. We did works by up and coming choreographers at the time in the 70s and 80s.
00:07:26
Speaker
I was there from 70 to 80. I started in Dayton in 80. But those 10 years in Birmingham set me up. The last maybe four or five years, he had separated four of us, another man and myself, and two other women. And we had a two-hour class, just the four of us, five days a week. Four, what, 40-something weeks a year? Intense. Fix this. This is how you fix this. And what he did, even when I started,
00:07:56
Speaker
part of the program was you were taught to teach so I started teaching babies I started teaching the adults we started teaching each other there was pedagogy all the time there was anatomy classes there were theory and placement classes where we sat down and broke this stuff down before we got to stand up in the studio and learn
00:08:20
Speaker
So it was fascinating, and I got out of it a base that has sustained me to this day. And it's very odd, because a lot of times I will hear my teachers sitting on my tongue as I'm talking to students. Because the corrections haven't changed, really, the standards of what they were, and the standards were so high.
00:08:40
Speaker
because we had these people coming in from all over the globe. And how that happened, and it just happened because Stefan was associated with Ben Stevenson and Frederick Franklin. And we got guest artists coming in to inspire us to carry on. It was, what's that word, fertile. It was just... It was fertile. When I'm hearing this story, and I'm like, when you said that it's tipping off your tongue, that's how I feel when I'm teaching, because I can still hear your voice.
00:09:05
Speaker
I really do, Greg, as an educator, because now it's like I feel like there's a through line. It's like, you know, because I started late. I was like, you know, I was sucking it up like a sponge. I was absorbing everything I could get my hands on to be this guy who was going to dance. Oh, yeah, I know. I know. So that's really important. It's really interesting that it's that seems to be the way. I guess my question was that unusual for the time to have that kind of an
00:09:32
Speaker
for not just the fertility, but that kind of immersion. Was that typical? I can't answer that because that's all I knew. Outside of the university experience, I hadn't gone to an audition. That came later and that was even more information to support where I was, was probably one of the best places I could be.
00:09:53
Speaker
because of the individual attention I got. I mean, it was a university company. There were probably eight to 10 principal soloists, if you want to call them that, and enough people in the school, the community school as they called it then for the university, to make up a quarter ballet when we needed it. So there were always 20 to 30 people in the room when we were having full master classes.
00:10:17
Speaker
In my dance naivete, I knew that it felt good and that it felt right. But I didn't know how right it was until I got away from Birmingham. Let's just study during the summer. But our teachers were great. They would say, you're not going to sit around during the summer. This summer, we're going to go to France.
00:10:39
Speaker
and we're going to study in Cannes for six weeks and we're going to live in a villa and we're going to travel the coast of France every weekend until we come back.
00:10:49
Speaker
My mom was like, of course you're going. You're going for that. So that was the way and I guess spoiled because I didn't know. I didn't know what it was to not be accepted at face value yet. I didn't, you know, I didn't know that.
00:11:09
Speaker
I could be discounted as well as counted. That came later. And that happened in one day. As I said, Birmingham Civic Ballet, one of the leaders of that company, Peggy Dexter was her name. Her daughter was Ellen. She was a principal in the company, amazing dancer. And Peggy said, you need to go see the rest.
00:11:35
Speaker
of the world. So she arranged for about a week for me to go to New York. And she was my chaperone and her daughter was there too. And to have me to, you know, see, see New York because I'd never been, take classes at some places, get opinions about what I should do. So I met with Maria Vey, then at the Harkness Valley. And the next day I met with Leon Doneelian, who is in charge of the school at American Valley.
00:12:04
Speaker
theater at the time. She, British, traditionally looked at my physique and discounted. He, being a man, looked at my physique and said, oh yes, you need to do this. So I got the choice then and there within 48 hours. You can do
Opportunities in Choreography and Joining Dayton Ballet
00:12:25
Speaker
this or you could not do this.
00:12:27
Speaker
Having known what I did coming from Birmingham, I just went back home where I felt normal and didn't feel like I had to prove, I just had to learn. So that was that lesson. Around 79 is when I met Stewart. That connection of National Ballet. Stewart was a principal in the company at the time and very young decided he'd rather choreograph than dance because he'd had some big successes early on as a choreographer.
00:12:57
Speaker
I think he got a commission from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, which was kind of unheard of that someone outside of it would come in, was getting commissions from Joffrey and Joffrey II in New York. So he was establishing himself as a choreographer while he was dancing.
00:13:14
Speaker
Being a son of Dayton, Ohio, of course he came under Miss Joe and Miss Hermine. I don't know how that all happened because when I met Stewart, he was just this choreographer guy. Just as the choreographer guy. Right. Not much older than me.
00:13:31
Speaker
And he came to Birmingham and he set the piece that was one of my favorites to dance in. It's for four people, and until I stopped dancing, no one else did the role that I did in it. The other three changed, but I was always around to do that part. It was called Romance. It was set to Rachmaninoff. Yes. I've had the good fortune of seeing it. I've seen you perform it. It's beautiful. It's stunning. It's a trip.
00:14:00
Speaker
Is it true? It is, because there are four characters, I mean, four personalities. He was so clever in how he would tell you what he wanted out of you. And because we were close in age, his references did not escape me at all. So he would talk about, you have to feel like it's four people at a cocktail party, and I'm not gonna tell you who's together and who's fighting. You're gonna have to figure that out in the choreography.
00:14:29
Speaker
And that's how he worked with you he would give you an outline rather than say do this this way now. He was so musical and his musical choices again that rock my variations on the thing by correlli we use the recording by Vladimir Ashkenazi.
00:14:47
Speaker
And I say that because I learned so much from Stuart about music and how to take a score that wasn't written for dance and use that topography or that geography of the music to construct a piece. And having a musical education, it just fit in my ideas of what I could do as a choreographer.
00:15:09
Speaker
So that was how we met and we premiered the piece at the end of 79. That next year he was appointed director and he asked me to come and audition. He asked all four of us to come and audition. Two of us did. One went to Boston and one retired.
00:15:29
Speaker
But he was so, I don't want to say beholden, but he was so happy with the results of that piece of choreography from four untried dancers that he was like, please come join me if you can. And that's how I got to Dayton in 1980. You know, that's long story short. But it's just supposed to be a long story.
00:15:52
Speaker
And so we're going to touch on that transition and the long story to date and what that means. And we're going to take a little bit of a break and then we're going to jump into that part of your life. The Dayton years. Let's call it the Dayton years. The Dayton years.
00:16:11
Speaker
We want to remind you that if you like what you're listening to and are not a member of OhioDance, you can go to OhioDance.org and click the membership button to join and receive the many benefits that come with your membership. You can also donate through our purple donate button.
00:16:33
Speaker
All right, Greg, what I love about the long story, because it's a journey, because life is a journey. The years coming to Dayton, I mean, this invitation to audition, what did you think when, you know, this invitation to come to Dayton at the time was, were Josephine and Hermine Schwartz, were they still active with the company? Did you interact and engage with them?
00:16:54
Speaker
Coming from the South, Miss Jo and Miss Hermine were like the aunties of the Dayton Valley when I got here. Do you know what I mean? I do. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And and I'd heard when I got here, I heard stories about Miss Jo and how how she could be. And people didn't think she was always nice. Let's put it that way.
00:17:13
Speaker
I'm like this, the woman who's trying to run a business in the 30s in Ohio, an unmarried woman who probably, how could she even get her signature recognized? You needed to have a husband to open a bank account. Let alone a line of credit. Right, right. Let's just be very real about the logistics of misogyny, right? Exactly.
00:17:34
Speaker
and a Jewish woman in a Catholic town. Dayton was highly Catholic at that point. And it still is in many ways. Right. But just thinking on that and coming from Birmingham and having a real understanding of what she might have had to experience to get to where she was.
00:17:51
Speaker
I didn't have any history with them. So I was meeting them as these lovely old ladies. And I thought Miss Jo was just the best. She was a no joke. Just like Geraldine Blunden was no joke. Because they couldn't be. They had to say this now, this way. And I got that because that's how I was taught.
00:18:12
Speaker
And again, not harshly, but get on with it. Get to work. Going back, part of my education was don't stand there and watch those people fix what you just did so you can bring it back on the floor better. Yeah, observe, but why are you standing around?
00:18:29
Speaker
Did you absorb the information? Yes. Did you take in the corrections? Right. Because that's the note that that's the thing I was talking about, Greg, like that through line of teaching. I say that to students all the time. I was like, this is the moment to take the notes that were given to the group that just moved.
00:18:47
Speaker
Right. Now, the faster you work, the faster you progress. You don't have to be careless, but you got to be quick. And right now, with the nature of choreography being the amalgam that it is, whether you're in a contemporary company or even classical, Royal Ballet does the most outrageous contemporary work at this point. They really do.
00:19:11
Speaker
I only say royal because their standard is, their seeming standard is such a esoteric elitist. There's a gentility, this sort of class-based gentility. I had the good fortune of seeing Royal Ballet perform. That was a three-hour love fest to the art of dance. It started off with Wayne McGregor who- Was it Chroma?
00:19:34
Speaker
No, it was Obsidian's Tier. Yes, yes. I mean, I just sat there gobsmacked. I mean, I just sat there as just like, oh. And the fact that it's that company doing it. That company doing it. And he does not come from a ballet base. No, no. He comes in this very postmodern aesthetic. And so I just find that really fascinating because that's one of the things that, you know, when you talk about Miss Jo and Miss Geraldine, they're the aunties of Danson and Dayton. They really are. And no nonsense in many ways.
00:20:04
Speaker
How did they, your presence, you know, as an African-American man, I mean, Ms. Joe didn't care. I got the impression either you can dance or you can't.
00:20:15
Speaker
To Miss Jo, who had had a history of inclusion and diversity in her company, Art Jackson, Donna Wood. Dances of color were recognized and developed here in Dayton and sent on to greater things. So when I showed up, I was just another kid who just happened to not be the same color as she was.
00:20:36
Speaker
But that was about it. She would pull me aside and tell me exactly what she thought about a performance of mine. And it was never devastating to me if she didn't like what I did because she told me why. And I took that critique and worked it because I'm thinking this woman knows trillions more than I do at this point. So yes, I will listen to what she has to say and the respect that she's the founder of the company. And I'm here. Even in my dancing, there's some stewardship going on.
Artistic Growth at Dayton Ballet
00:21:04
Speaker
I'm still trying to uphold the standard of the company that she set for. And Stewart was very clear that that was what he was there for, too. Now, that being said, we had a ball. That I kind of gathered when I joined in. I will say I had a ball because I don't want to speak for anybody else.
00:21:25
Speaker
But my experience of being a dancer, especially those 10 years with Stuart, were just wonderful. Because when I got here, and dancers do this a lot, you get a job or a new position and you go through that period where you're like, why did they actually take me? And again, being as naive as I was and not understanding the, not the politics, but the way we have to go about things.
00:21:50
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? It's not political. That's not the right word. The perfunctory things you need to do to get through. Exactly, exactly. And here I was. I was in a professional environment instead of in an academic environment. And it took me a while to shift that paradigm. And the shift wasn't a bad thing. I got lost in my head when I got here. You know how people say I got in my head about it? I so got in my head.
00:22:20
Speaker
and I was the only one in my head about it. And so Stuart pulled me aside one day and he says, look, I think you're struggling with something and I'm gonna tell you this, I trust your instincts. I said, I'm gonna work you, I'm gonna make you do things that you're not used to doing or you know, that need to level up on, but I trust your instincts. And for a director who is your principal teacher to tell you that it freed me up, it allowed me to just go.
00:22:48
Speaker
We go back to the point of race, the big R word. So here's the picture in Birmingham, Alabama, 1971. I was not the only person of color in the company. Really? No, there were. Wow. There was another man, Theotis Thomas. There was another woman.
00:23:08
Speaker
It wasn't that I hadn't seen dancers of color. It wasn't uncommon. No, no. It wasn't one of these situations where, oh, I've entered into this world that feels like an alien landscape. Right. And my teachers in Birmingham, he was Yugoslavian.
00:23:25
Speaker
and she was of Yugoslavian descent but grew up in Florida. So their take on color, I was like Josephine Baker to him. He enjoyed my presence and he knew that it was shaking things up in Birmingham. He never let me know just how shaken up people got about
00:23:44
Speaker
because there were letters and there were phone calls. Because I was dancing with a lot of white women. Let's just face it. In Birmingham in 1970, and that required touching them, holding them, lifting them. Sometimes there was a romantic involvement. You know, sometimes there was an antagonistic involvement just to end on the choreography.
00:24:05
Speaker
and the years later almost actually once I'd gotten a date and I found out just how much he absorbed and buffered for me so that I wasn't taking on crap that I didn't need to take on.
00:24:19
Speaker
That's what I mean about how cared for I was and didn't realize it as I was trained. And the same thing happened when I got here with Stuart. And the same thing happened with Ms. Joe. The same thing happened with Geraldine. It was this welcoming to what's that, what's that value? It was like being welcomed to the front porch of heaven. It really was.
00:24:39
Speaker
And you were the recipient of all these, this blessing of this, of this kind of, it's a cocooning in a way to allow you to be the performer that you were. Right. It was, I was allowed in and I didn't have to do anything but continue to be me. And the, the, the relationship with.
00:24:56
Speaker
Dayton Valley and DC DC because of the relationship with this Joe and Geraldine was very fluid. There was so much passage between the companies. We knew each other. We appreciate each other. We got to see each other perform, which kind of led to getting to choreograph. One of the first things I did was a collaboration between DC DC and Dayton Valley.
00:25:20
Speaker
And it's just a duet, Gershwin Piano Preludes, that I got to dance. Stewart said, who would you like to dance it with? And without a beat, I'm like, oh, Sherry Williams, please. Please, Sherry Williams. Wow. Yeah, we still regard that as just a high point for both of us. It was just lovely. And to get to do it with someone I met that I thought was so fabulous of a dancer.
00:25:47
Speaker
And again, the same thing, justice ordinary, let's get to work. What would you like for me to do? Is this enough? She honored me as a choreographer without even knowing what I could do, basically. Geraldine did the same thing. Stewart did the same thing.
00:26:01
Speaker
the trust, the trust, the generosity of it. You know, I'm going to trust you enough to hand you my diamond. Just don't break it. Just don't break it. Which of course you never did. And so let's talk about that of a choreographic sample, that trust.
00:26:18
Speaker
because I'm going to get back to the Dayton Valley, DC-DC connective threads because that history is fascinating to me. You travel from the music, playing the clarinet, wanting to understand how to play for, which I think laid the groundwork to why your ballets were so successful on many levels, not just visually, but it's just the connective threads to the movement and music. It just felt like interwoven. Thanks.
00:26:45
Speaker
You know me. Oh, which is what you should strive for. I mean, there's got to be. Right. You can't do stuff that nobody's going to want to see.
00:26:54
Speaker
And you don't know if they're going to want to see it. So you got to work that into building a piece sometimes. Not all the time. I had the quilt of the music wrapped around me when I choreographed. Sometimes I would say, I'm dating Rachmaninoff and right now we're fighting. We're fighting. That's a battle. It's really really because it's like not coming from a musical background.
00:27:21
Speaker
coming from a visual arts background. Mine was always seeing shapes and forms. I can see that. I saw everything in shapes and forms. And it was like, I could just see the puzzle pieces. I'm like, okay. Because someone asked me that question about choreography and I knew you were very musical. So then I was like, oh, this is where the musicality comes from. So
00:27:42
Speaker
Is it any difference in choreographing in these different genres and styles? I mean, is it just, hey, you know, you've you've choreographed from news machine opera.
00:27:52
Speaker
Miami University, you know what I'm saying? I mean, the list. When you're around a long time, it ends up looking like a lot of things. But yeah, when I choreograph, usually it starts on the music. I'm not one to create a vocabulary of steps and then applique that onto something else.
Teaching Philosophy and Community Impact
00:28:14
Speaker
Organically for me, the richness comes out of my response to the music, first of all.
00:28:20
Speaker
And then from that response, I can decide, well, I'm going to go exactly that way. Or you know what? Today, I'm going to counter every intuition I have just to see what happens. And sometimes the piece will tell you, go this way, stupid.
00:28:36
Speaker
Quit going that way. No, go this way. Again, when you're in your head or, you know, in your thoughts about it, you have to allow it to breathe on its own. And for me, that becomes exciting. And shapes and forms, oh, yeah, lines, diagonals, entrances and exits. Is it nothing stronger to me than a diagonal crossing one way?
00:29:05
Speaker
So I have to, you know, not play to my biases or my, not bias, but to the things that I find as favorites. And sometimes if I really say, stop doing that and do the opposite, something wonderful comes out of it.
00:29:21
Speaker
or if not wonderful, at least unexpected enough that I can recharge my thoughts about it and go in a slightly different direction. There's an energy that comes from that sort of pivot
00:29:36
Speaker
in a different direction that just feels, it's hard to explain, like I get so in the weeds with making that when I'm in there, nothing else exists. I mean, time, space, okay, they've turned into everything everywhere all at once. I'm Michelle Yeoh, and so.
00:29:55
Speaker
I am doing the battle with the everything bagel. But what the joy was, I remember one of my distinct memories is watching you create something on DB2, the second company of Dayton Ballet. That was when, and I wasn't choreographing, but that was when the moment I said, that just looks fun as hell. Making seems like the world I should be in.
00:30:18
Speaker
And I attribute it to that set spot, so. I did my first dance step legitimate at 18. And teaching at Wright State now, I always let the freshmen know that. I get you. I get how you're thinking. I get how terrified you can be, because everything you know isn't in question as you think it is. Nobody's saying, drop all that luggage, and no, bring that luggage with you. But let's go buy a few other things for this trip we're going to be on.
00:30:48
Speaker
And I let them know that, yeah, it's daunting, but you know what? It's not impossible. And as we were talking earlier, if you work at a certain speed and clip, and if you take the little hints I'm giving you about how to build a better brain to do it, not just a better body, and quit putting yourself down.
00:31:10
Speaker
Amen. Stop it. I just said that last night to a group of dancers. I was like, if you do not love yourself doing this, what is the point? Stop it. Exactly. Oh, I will say you have to be your cheerleader. You have to be your most loving support through this.
00:31:29
Speaker
I'm going to love you as a teacher, but I cannot live in your head. And I know the thoughts you have because I had them. That's the thing I can tell my students is I know what you're thinking. We can work on theory placement, better body. We can work that out. But until you work on your mental approach to it, a calm mental approach to it, an uncluttered mental approach to it.
00:31:56
Speaker
How can we bind ourselves in dance with a singular approach? You don't have to do 20 things at once. You really only are going to do one thing at once. And as soon as you can understand, I'm going to think about it before I get there rather than once I get there, then you start to make even more progress. So that's kind of the nut of my education. I love that. And so when I talked about the award winning and I want to talk about that because I think that's really important.
00:32:24
Speaker
You're receiving your flowers, so to speak. I mean, that's what I have a question about because it's like you won the Virginia Sebastian Award for choreography in 86. That was with the company, correct? That was for the first big piece I did for the company. What was that first big piece? It was called Light. It was to music a Philip Glass, extremely abstract piece about the nature of light, refraction, diffusion, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:53
Speaker
which came from my fascination with Dark Side of the Moon album cover. That light coming through that prism. I was like, oh yeah, I can do that. I can do that in a ballet. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd. Led to that work. Oh my gosh. Led to that. Right. And that was named after Stewart's mother, Virginia Sebastian, who was what will, I'll say she was the Dorothy Parker of Dayton, Ohio when I moved here.
00:33:19
Speaker
Stuart was such a character and I can imagine that there's these conversations that the two of you would have about making art and choreography. Did you guys talk about that? Oh, he was very open about talking about it. He would have me over. He's like, listen to this.
00:33:37
Speaker
He was always playing music. And as he's listening to it, he's telling me what he's seeing happening as a choreographer, which was, oh, God, masterclass, just impromptu masterclass. And we did that a lot. Or I would bring music to him that, you know, I had heard or wondered if he'd heard. But he was so knowledgeable about that because of the experiences he'd had coming from Dayton to go into, you know, National Valley, et cetera.
00:34:04
Speaker
So yeah, being close to the same age, even though he was my employer, we had a nice friendship going on and a beautiful exchange as an established artist teaching a developing artist without being pedantic about it.
00:34:21
Speaker
Love it. So, Craig, I mean, you kind of touched that you touch base that you're teaching at Wright State now. So not to say all of a sudden, what's next for Gregory Robinson? But what is an essence? I am asking what's next for you, sir. What is what's next for you right now? I'm happy where things are. My time at Wright State has helped me develop even stronger ideas as a teacher.
00:34:47
Speaker
and being able to have students for years at a time and seeing that those notes that we repeated since ad infinitum actually do help. The students helped me to develop and affirm a methodology that actually works to keep people going. I tell them you're here for four years and you're trying to get 10 years of work in.
00:35:10
Speaker
I start to impress about them how little time they're actually spending on this, however they want to do it once they're graduated. You only have me for so many hours this semester, so you need to start thinking about what, without me being a beast of demanding things, I'm still going to demand these things because they've got to happen.
00:35:31
Speaker
And this isn't physical recklessness. This is really understanding your body, understanding how you can learn. Nobody's going to develop 180 degree turnout. But you can start to develop 180 degree turnout. And if you keep working toward that, it will get better. But don't accept where you are as the end of it. Because that's not going to work in whatever you decide to do once you leave here.
00:35:56
Speaker
And that's what I like about Wright State is the vastness of the program. There's no concentration. Everybody does ballet every day. Then there's modern, and then there's jazz, and then there's a theater dance. There's tap. It's a conservatory approach. You can decide afterwards what you're going to hold on to or what you're going to let go. Right. And what's the next, for lack of a better term, step in the process of being an artist, in essence, to be a movement artist.
00:36:23
Speaker
Right. The ballet dancers will always end up being ballet dancers. It's not, you know, but the program is wide enough and inclusive enough that we're not expecting every student to come in to be Galsy Curl. And we're not expecting every student to want to achieve the point of going into a ballet company. Some people want to, they're really wanting to go into commercial dance, which is a legitimate field as far as I'm concerned. You got to make your money and you got to make it somehow. And students who have come through since I've been there have been making successes of it.
00:36:53
Speaker
you know, from big companies to cruise ships to small independent companies, but they're working. They've not like come out of the program and just stopped. And they're happy with what happened those four years to get them where they are now. That's really cool. So Greg, I feel like, oh yeah, folks, I'm very lucky that, you know, when Greg and I run into each other, we have these really great funny
00:37:20
Speaker
and profane conversations. But it's lovely to have this conversation with you about your life and dance and as a movement generator and as an educator. So folks, when you see Gregory's name, Gregory Robinson's name attached to it, you need to go see it, participate in it, be a part of it. It's such a pleasure and an honor. We share history. Well, that we do Rodney, that we do. Yes, we do.
00:37:45
Speaker
And it's just love. And just the fact that you're continuing from where you began in the way you're going to do it. And that's all I ask from people I've had the honor to teach, which in it to me, it is an honor because you don't have to hear what I've got to say. If you believe what I'm telling you, great, because I know it's going to work for you. But if you don't feel it, great. Let's find you somewhere else where you can be.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:38:13
Speaker
because it happens too fast and it's over before you know it. And God forbid you go one way and your foot goes the other way and it's done. So I keep telling my students, what are you waiting for? Don't be crazy, but come on, level up, please. Level up, please.
00:38:32
Speaker
I think I'm on that leveling up. What did it say? Living your best life. That can happen artistically as well. But it's the gerund living. You are doing it. You're not just, well, it's like turnout. You can't go buy it. You got to do it. You got to do it. Yes, you do. Right. If you could buy it, we'd all be at Kmart. Yes, we would. I'd work the self-checkout for more turnout. There you go.
00:39:01
Speaker
I love it. So this has been lovely. Thanks. Thank you, Rodney, so much. I really appreciate it. It's been a great fun. My privilege, my pleasure and my honor.
00:39:16
Speaker
A State of Dance is produced by Ohio Dance and hosted by Rodney Veal, executive producer Jane DiAngelo, editor and audio technician Jessica Cavender, musical composition by Matthew Peyton Dixon. Ohio Dance would like to thank our funders, the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio State University Dance Preservation Fund, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Columbus Foundation, and the Akron Community Fund.