From the beginning, dance has shaped who Robert Dekkers is as a person. He grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia and started taking ballet at the age of five. His mother is a piano teacher and he has an aunt who is a choral singer. He also played the cello when he was growing up. “There has always been music in my family,” he says. It might help explain his affinity for music that has helped to enhance his career as a choreographer. “I’ve always performed with live musicians. Working with live musicians is an important part of my creative community.”
And he has always had a passion for movement. He remembers asking his mother every day, “When would I take ballet?” He doesn’t even know how he knew about ballet. “I guess I saw it on TV.” There was no single epiphany that told him dance was his destiny. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know dance was part of my life in a very integral way.” As a little kid, he remembers being in the grocery store dancing down the aisles, turning and spinning. “Dance is where I feel most like myself.”
He started training at the School of Atlanta Ballet, where he studied on scholarship from the ages five to fourteen. Then at fourteen, he switched to a smaller school, Gwinnett Ballet Theater. “The training was really wonderful,” he says. “Artistic Director Lisa Sheppard (Lisa Sheppard Robson) took me under her wing and gave me so much support as a dancer. She saw that I was interested in choreography and let me do a piece. I went on to train in choreography.” By the age of eighteen, he had already created a few pieces. In the senior year of high school, he interned with Lisa Sheppard, taught at the school, wrote grants, attended board meetings, actually learned Robert’s Rules of Order and ran board meetings. The range and depth of the experience became an early training ground to become not only a dancer but also to evolve into becoming a world-class choreographer and a director.
SIXES AND SEVEN
(Performed by
Robert Dekkers
at the UN Plaza
in San Francisco. Music by
Philip Glass)