Robyn Taylor

When I returned to school at the age of twenty-nine, I was looking for a meaningful way to engage with the world. At the same time, I recognized that my previous life experience gave me valuable knowledge. As a massage therapist, I developed sensitivity to both my own body and to those of the people on whom I was working. My knowledge in anatomy and physiology informed my dance practice. My experiences in surfing, traveling, and being married have all influenced my kinesthetic, intellectual, and creative research pursuits. However, I was in search of a way intellectualize my observations about the culture and community I was living in.

In my first semester back at school, I took a creative writing class that woke up a dormant part of my mind. It seemed as though I had not picked up a book in five years. All of sudden I could not put them down. I was in love with Henry David Thoreau, weather patterns, and my modern dance class. It was clear that I needed to pursue interdisciplinary studies.

If American studies offered me a range of possible texts to critically read, from the graffiti along the Arizona/Mexican border, to Chinese American immigration trauma imaged in a dance piece, performance studies gave me permission to read these texts using both my verbal and kinesthetic intelligence. For my honors senior project at UCB, I choreographed a dance piece exploring the intersection between language and movement. I used segments of texts from On the Road, Moby Dick, and Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” as my sound score for this piece. I also taught an experimental class in the dance department using metaphor as the thematic approach to my process-led research. In my fifty-five page thesis, I discussed these processes, by applying them to the specific theoretical concept of American individualism.

At UCB I had the opportunity to take classes from incredible professors who are also renowned Bay Area artists such as Joe Goode, Lisa Wymore, and Amara Tabor-Smith. Also, I have studied with many Bay Area teachers who are investigating new methods of body research and who are influencing the Bay Area dance culture. As well as the three professors I listed above, I have been deeply influenced by: SanSan Kwan, Christine Palmer, Kenneth Speirs, John Shoptaw, and Frank Gaspar. These professors are not only committed to their own work, they have shown great generosity in the art of teaching.

During my first semester in the dance department at UCB, Ciré Beye, dancer and choreographer from Senegal, led a three-week residency in Sabar. This was my first experience with any kind of African dance. When I felt the rhythms of Sabar, I felt as if I were dancing for the first time. This first experience with Sabar woke up my dance spirit, but it also precipitated a need to delve into and ask questions about my relationship to colonization, slavery, and racism. At this time I was rejecting classical dance forms in my own body, which paralleled to the work I was reading on the postmodern dance movement. I have been attempting to intellectualize my body processes ever since. The experience with Beye, initiated my eventual quest of attending a six-week dance workshop at Ecole des Sables in Senegal where I continued my inquiry about identity.

Currently I am residing in Paris, France where I am taking professional contemporary dance classes at Menagerie de Verre as well as various African dance forms at Centre Momboye. I am collaborating with Kéwé Lô and several street artists on a mixed media piece on site at La Miroiterie. In January, I will spend two months in Salvador, Brazil where I am taking a Silvestre Technique certification workshop led by Rosangela Silvestre. As I continue my travels and engagements with different parts of the world, I will continue to investigate my own internal relationship with my body, my identity, and my process of exchange with these places. 

Robyn's Blog: http://robynannetaylor.blogspot.com