The New Kid, Again
Part 1
By Robbi Moore, DWC Ambassador
Pronunciation: Rob-bee More| Pronouns: they/them
I arrived in Seattle, WA on September 2, 2016. I was supposed to get here on the 1st, but that is a story for another day. There were a lot of firsts that year. It was my first, and so far only, major full time dance company. My first time ever being on the West Coast at all. My first time living in a state where access to immediate family was physically inaccessible without a plane ticket. I was truly on my own.
During my two years with Spectrum Dance Theater, most of the other dancers were like me in the sense that they had moved to Seattle for that specific job. Only a couple of people were from Washington. It was not until I left the company in 2018 and started freelancing that I began to interact with a wider range of local choreographers and dancers, many of whom were born and raised in Washington, and others like me who had moved from other places. There were artists who were more seasoned who were not from Seattle, but had been here so long that they had earned the right to say they were from here. In 2018, with most of my experiences in the first two years of living in Seattle being with one company, I felt like “The New Kid” all over again while navigating the freelance scene and the newfound interests of people who were meeting me for the first time.
I had auditioned for 3 other companies on the West Coast in Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. respectively, as well as West Side Story at the 5th Avenue Theatre, after leaving Spectrum Dance Theater, and did not make it into any of them. I decided to stay in Seattle, with only one teaching position still at Spectrum Dance Theater and a plan to audition as a dancer for the Tint Festival. I had a day job working at the front desk at a fitness center, and I did not think there would be much else to my life outside of that going forward.
Luckily, I would be wrong.
The two pieces that I got into for the Tint Festival would turn into three after being invited to join PRICEarts as a guest artist. Whidbey Island Dance Theatre would reach out to me to play two demanding roles in their Nutcracker. It would be the first of a total of five times. Tacoma Urban Performing Arts Center would reach out to me to play The Nutcracker in their first ever production of The Urban Nutcracker. This would be the first of four times. Cyrus Khambatta would reach out to me via email asking me to come to a rehearsal for an audition and the rest was history. I ended up dancing with Khambatta Dance Company for nearly four years, traveling to Germany, India, France, and Rhode Island, as well as working with International Artists.
In early 2019, Alex Ung, director of The Guild Dance Company would reach out to me to perform in “Immigration Stories'', a show I would do a second time that Fall, and choreograph on fellow dancers in the company, as well as a couple of essential pandemic dance videos. Four years later, I can call Alex a friend, and I am a supporter of The Guild. I auditioned for Karin Steven’s “Sea Change Within Us,” which would lead to four other dances with her company. I attended the Coriolis audition for their full-length version of “Danses des Cygnes” out of curiosity for the work, not thinking I would get into the piece. Not only would I be cast in the work, but I would go on to do a couple more performances with the company and as of recently, become a curator for one of their shows featuring Seattle based artists, Wielding Forms.
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I would attend a workshop for The Gray, not knowing if I would be selected for any projects. I would later be asked to perform twice that year. I filled an emergency role in International Ballet Theatre’s excerpt of “Sleeping Beauty” as Puss in Boots. I would be recommended to perform with Kinesis Project Dance Theatre, a New York based company that had recently become bi-coastal, a format that helped the company do very well during the pandemic when we were on Zoom. I would perform with Kinesis several times throughout the next 2 years.
This still does not sum up everything I have done as a freelance artist. Working for all of these companies created a game of Tetris that freelancers know all too well. It is a good problem to have, but that does not mean it did not come with some sacrifices and heartache. In January of 2019, I quit my job at the fitness center after it was highly suggested that I find other work after having to miss so much work to do two Nutcrackers during the holiday season at the end of 2018. In March of 2019, I was offered a regular dance teaching job that I thought would last through June, but I was abruptly let go after just one month. I invested in applying to two other teaching jobs, not knowing if I would get either. Those two schools were Exit Space School of Dance and Rainier Dance Center. I still teach at Rainier, four years later, and while my teaching position at Exit Space was cut short by the pandemic, I have maintained a relationship with the studio as a substitute, open class student, supporter, and performer in festivals curated and hosted there. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Discover Dance program had also reached out to me, offering me a position as a Teaching Artist Apprentice. Add in another studio that I had substituted at who desperately needed a teacher that year, and I found myself in the Fall of 2019 teaching at four different studios, in two pieces for the Men in Dance Festival, rehearsing for two Nutcrackers, teaching for Discover Dance, and preparing for my second tour with Khambatta Dance Company to India.
It was the busiest I had ever been. I must admit that I really did not know how to take care of my mental health at the time. I had a lot of anxiety about not letting people down, and it did not help that I still had to prove myself to a whole bunch of new people who did not know me as an artist or as a person. My appeal relied on me adapting to what everyone wanted from me while seeming cool, calm, and collected, which is the complete opposite of what I was actually feeling. I was grateful for all these opportunities, but it was hard to keep imposter syndrome from creeping in. I had moved to Seattle in 2016 for Spectrum Dance Theater, and in 2019 I found myself doing work that I never planned on doing and had no clue where these new relationships would take me. I was truly winging it and had no plan whatsoever.
I am grateful for everything I was offered, but at that time, I was experiencing a lot of personal grief. The first was leaving Spectrum Dance Theater, and thus leaving a community of people that I had gotten to know and had seen every day for two years. I had invested so much in that job and it was the reason why I moved out here in the first place. It ended sooner than I had initially intended, but looking back, I cannot imagine it going any other way. A fresh twenty-three-year-old making the decision to move across the country for a famous dance company with no backup plan seems like an accurately young-minded thing to do.
I was also grieving the recent loss of my Nana after her long, difficult battle with dementia, and with it, the security and connection to the part of my childhood that included her, a part of my life that none of my new colleagues had ever witnessed. Those that knew were definitely supportive and sympathetic, but because no one out here really knows my family, my personal struggles with the fact that the entire structure of my personal life had shifted drastically in the background of my dance career were not factored into how people saw me. I knew so many people, but I did not know anyone well enough to feel comfortable confiding such personal feelings in people who I had just met professionally. I put a lot of pressure on myself to act like I was fine when I really was not. I was in high demand as a dancer and there were a lot of eyes on me. It made sense. I was and still am one of the few black male dancers in the concert dance scene in Seattle. I know I am a commodity in this community and I vow to never lose sight of that awareness.
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