Curtain Up: The Robin Dawn Story
We would run down the street from one to the other," said Robin Dawn, the personable director of the Robin Dawn Academy for Performing Arts, as she reminisced about those early days when she was struggling to position herself as a teacher. "Forty-second Street was scary, but I'd run from Phil Black's class across town; it was up a tiny staircase and through a narrow hall - to the studio where I studied with Gregory Hines, long before he was famous, and took classes with Frank Hatchett as well. Phil Black was strict; his classes were very structured, and that has influenced my own teaching."
In those long-ago days when Dawn was just beginning to establish her name and her studio, she would use the summers to come up to New York City from Florida in order to study with the best teachers. She was only eighteen when she opened her first studio, and though her résumé was already filled with years of dance training, gymnastics, competitions, and even circus work, "Miss Robin," as her students fondly call her, was in pursuit of excellence. And she still believes in using the summer for extra classes.
"If the students really want to do something with a dance career, they can't wait for the fall. They have to keep studying. I want my students to study with other teachers and get exposed to other dancers. Learn that they are a little fish in a big pond. It's easy to be a big fish here, but you have to step outside of the box and you have to see what else is out there," explained Dawn, whose words spill out in a wave of energy. It's hard not to get carried along in her enthusiasm about teaching and guiding young people. "That's why I think competition is so wonderful. You can see what other kids your age are doing, and you can say "'well if they can do that, why can't I?'"
These aren't empty words. To listen to Dawn speak of her own struggles, which she does with a sense of humor and delight in her own adventures, without dwelling on the hardships she encountered, is to admire a woman whose own determination and pluck has served as an example to her many students over the last thirty-two years.
"I've danced in musicals and choreographed a variety of performances over the years, but I never, never thought I would own a dance school," Dawn told me in one of her large dance studios. Photographs of her students, many of whom have gone on to dance on Broadway, with Disney in Florida and Japan, on cruise ships, and even as stunt doubles in Hollywood, line the walls of this and the other five studios that make up the Robin Dawn Academy for the Performing Arts in Cape Coral, Florida. We are meeting for the first time, and I listen in admiration as Dawn, a smiling, loquacious woman, described her peripatetic career that began as a successful child performer in Indianapolis.
"My mother had it all planned. She named me Robin Dawn because that was going to be my stage name. Before we moved to Florida, I had a teacher who taught me that nothing was impossible, and those words have guided me over the years. When we moved down here, there wasn't any studio where we were living in Venice, and my Mom found the Sailor Circus in Sarasota. Not only did I want to do aerial work the moment I saw it (I had already won gymnastics competitions), but to my surprise," and Dawn halted for a moment and smiled..."I found out that my great grand-father was a high-wire walker and used to walk from building to building. I also learned that my grandparents had been clowns. There's an old saying that if you have sawdust in your blood that never changes."
And yes, Dawn spent her high school years traveling the thirty minutes up to Sarasota, learning circus work and rehearsing every day until late at night, when her mother would drive her home, and then it was up again for school the next morning. In those important teenage years, the words of her Indianapolis teacher sank in: "Nothing was impossible." The coach was strict, and the youthful group learned that discipline was not a word to be ignored. So, right after high school, she and two friends joined an old-fashioned circus located in a Colorado mountain town where the donkeys and horses and cows rambled freely in the streets. At the end of the summer, in a twist that sounds like a plot from an old movie, seventeen-year-old Robin had to call her parents for funds to return home. Thus began the saga of the next years, when after a stint at Edison Community College, Dawn began to coach gymnastics teams, choreograph solos for a beauty pageant, teach privately, and gradually gain the experience that has made her the caring teacher she is today.
"I was eighteen when my Mom rented me a room and that was my first studio. I painted the floor blue because that was my favorite color and got three mirrors to lean against the wall, but it was stop and start. The first year was the toughest. I slept in my studio and lived on crackers and Spam. In the summer, I did a stint with another circus to earn enough money to pay my debts. But then I started getting letters from my students pleading with me to come back. My Mom said "just one more year." She not only found a place for me to live, she went to another studio that had closed, and literally ripped the wooden floor from that studio by hand and brought it over to me and laid it down. It was a bigger studio with real mirrors. I had a good reputation from the recital I had put on the year before and from the beauty pageants. Still, at first, I had to moonlight. I worked as a dancing waitress at this place where you did a version of a cakewalk. I'd teach until six or six-thirty, and then I'd put on my uniform while I was driving (I don't how I did that) and work from seven until two o'clock in the morning. By the next year, I was ready to join the Dance Masters of America and learn their syllabus. Then I went to a workshop for Dance Educators of America, took their test, and immediately became a member."
Roxanne Moore, Dawn's right-hand assistant and manager for the last sixteen years, came into the studio from the office. She is holding a page of photos from the various, extravagant productions that are performed once a year, and we choose some from this year's "Welcome to the Jungle" show. "I don't know how I would manage without Roxanne," Robin said. "I have the ideas, and she's the business person."
"The Legends", a competition team, was created ten years ago and recently a younger group called "The Show Stoppers" was formed. "It's time consuming," Dawn replied, answering my question about her auditioning process. "I need students who have the focus, the drive and the commitment to be part of the team. The winning is not that important. It's the experience. I believe in positive reinforcement. For example, if one of my students feels bad after a performance, I tell them to give me three positives, and then we talk about the negative, about what needs work. I believe in loving and nurturing each student as if he or she were my own child. Our motto is 'quality training to last a lifetime' so that a student will benefit even if they do not go on to a career in dance." It is this philosophy that has infused all of the classes at the school. And over the years, the staff has grown to include eleven teachers in addition to Dawn, teaching classes in tap, jazz, ballet, hip hop, musical theater, tumbling and lyrical dance. But always, with the understanding that they will follow Dawn's example to do whatever is necessary to help a student achieve their own dream.
And Dawn has as many dreams today as she did as a young performer in Indiana. If she isn't choreographing a Broadway show for a dinner theater, or guest-teaching at another school, she is leading a group of her senior students to New York or Los Angeles for further study. Fortunately, Kevin Ryan is a very understanding husband whose own love of dance makes it possible for Robin Dawn to tread a path she began at the tender age of two, when she would take a small mat, knock on a neighbor's door, and ask: "Do you want to see a show?"