Robert Moses teaching. Photo by Peter Earl McCollough.
Hometown: Philadelphia
Current city: San Francisco
Age: 58
College and degree: Bachelors of Arts, Cal State University Long Beach
Website: RobertMosesKin.org
How you pay the bills: Speaking, teaching, commissions, artistic direction
All of the dance hats you wear: Dancer, Writer, Composer, Teacher, Speaker, Coach, Director
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My mission as an arts administrator is to create opportunities for enlightenment, to reinforce and provide the community with avenues that lead to realized cultural and personal voice. I hope to support the arts community in both embracing and challenging accepted norms and to support the discovery of what is specific and unique in our varied human natures as we travel those avenues. I have for decades used my service on panels, as an arts leader, art work and teaching work as platforms for focused expression in an effort to detail ideas on race, class, cultural belief, gender, and aspiration and use each medium as the vessel through which we gain a greater understanding of our intellectual interests and thereby give voice to the existence of the expanded possibilities of education and our individual potential and communal responsibility. My efforts are meant as testaments, cultural expressiveness and creative impulse, and about the power of educational growth.
As an intellectual explorer and artist I am interested in the honor, dignity , and potential of each of us. By working with multiple populations, youth groups, gospel choirs, spoken word organizations and more as I have over the course of my career, I believe we can both blur and clarify the lines that define understanding. As an African American male, a father, and a parent of two children of blended heritage, I feel invested personally in many of the issues that concern students on campus. Because of that I seek to speak with the voices of my heritage, to speak to the possibilities that my children hold, to uncover and use the full promise of a historically informed African American aesthetic forged by decades of multicultural, pan generational, post gender interactions, to honestly and respectfully and clearly help students to find their way forward.
I am also very aware of impermanence in my work – the tension between the past and the present, and the essential mutability of moments, feelings, people, and relationships. I choreograph the notion of “passing” from one moment, to the next, from one time in your life to the next, from one persona to the next – and the instability in time, space, emotion and thought. I was able to create “Lucifer’s Prance” because I wasn’t where I had been before; I had passed through. My piece “State of Annihilation” embodies loss and how one can find contentment in this world through non-attachment. As in dance, that which has no fixed nature can know no change, decay or death. I look for ways to reveal that transience we can only see if we are given the opportunity to slip away from ourselves.
My 20s:
During my time in, and after finishing school, I made a bit of work but I spent most of my time in rehearsal, class, training, and working with a variety of companies, including Jazz Movement Exchange, Mattie Hayes Afro Haitian Dance, ODC, Twyla Tharp Dance and American Ballet Theater among others. During that time I traveled from New Zealand to Venezuela and enjoyed most of it.
30s:
In my 30s my impulse to interpret others' visions was overwritten by a desire to more fully explore my on creative as well as performative inclinations. I continued to teach in studios and began teaching regularly in the universities, including UC Berkeley and Stanford University. I started RMK at 32, but began making work for small composite programs before that and setting work on local companies about that same time.
40s:
In my forties I worked conceptually and practically in many but not all of the social, emotional and intellectual modes that continue to interest me. I made a lot of work, some of it personal some in service, so for the love of it.
50s:
I am in the midst of this so this is hard to speak to.
RMK, SFUSD Fundraiser; photo courtesy of Robert Moses' KIN
What is on your calendar for 2021?
We have since Covid started produced 8 new digital works, and we have a great many digital premieres and live premieres upcoming, all of which will be announced on our website. We also are presenting artist talks and lectures at over a dozen educational institutions all over the country.
Please describe your most current project and the questions you are asking yourself right now as an artist.
"Thread" is a major work for dancers/storytellers/music gatherers/visual artists in which the re-creation of a fabled unconscious collective cultural mind, a mythical lost library of a destroyed African American culture, a people so powerful at one point they were by their God feared and made to forget who and what they were so that they would forever have to re-create themselves as two echoes. The first echo, that of who and what they were, the other of what they are being kept from by their God. The echoes escape from the throats of what are thought of as fictional characters.
How do you find dancers? What do you look for in a dancer?
Until 2020 I felt I had to see dancers live to have an understanding of what they had to offer. I feel that more strongly now but have gotten better at evaluating our chances for a successful collaboration via digital media. What do I look for in a dancer? An individual of strength and maturity. That dancer will find a way to honor your vision. But more practically and currently - word of mouth and on ine.
Current movement practices and care for the body:
Common sense, take a break once in a while, sit with friends in the park with a lemonade and a smile.
Athletic maintenance: I bike ride when time allows.
Please pose three questions for choreographers to consider:
Why do this now?
What is the real history of that idea?
Was it worth it?
What keeps you believing and passionate about modern dance in 2021?
My love of life, my mind' s eye
Last performance you saw that inspired you, or, a show that lingers with you:
I’ve seen so much during this time things are a bit of a mashup right now. I would say in this moment binge binge binge Art/Dance/Opera/Music/Theater/Storytelling…
Final thoughts - Hope/belief/love of the profession:
Keep going.
Robert Moses' KIN in rehearsal; photo by Steve Disenhof
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Related posts (current and former RMK collaborators):
Artist Profile: Raissa Simpson
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