Travis Wall has been dancing since he could walk. The Emmy Award-winning choreographer, who appeared in the second season of So You Think You Can Dance, has had his routines appear on Dancing With The Stars, the Academy Awards and in music videos and concerts from the likes of Carrie Underwood, Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato.
Wall and his dance company Shaping Sound are bringing their latest show “After the Curtain” to the King Center for the Performing Arts in Melbourne Feb. 10.
Wall took a few moments to speak with us by phone ahead of his show in Melbourne.
Watermark: When were you introduced to dancing? What was the journey you took to get you to where you are today?
Travis Wall: I literally started dancing the day I was born, I was born into it. My mother was my dance teacher and owned a successful dance studio in Virginia Beach, so I really didn’t have any choice.
I’ve always been obsessed with music and I’ve always moved to it, it’s just kind of a part of my DNA. I trained for a very long time under my mother and learned basically everything I know. Then around twelve years old I moved to New York City to start my professional career on Broadway. I did Music Man for about two years and then got injured during the show. Around that same time Sept. 11 happened and the show closed. That made me really miss home because I was living by myself, I was away from my mom, and away from the dance studio, so I decided to move back to Virginia to rehabilitate my hip.
I was taken away from being able to dance, and wasn’t focused as much on acting and singing because of my injuries. I was overweight and just really unhappy with the direction I was headed in with my life, so I got really, really serious about ballet and dancing and training.
I made a complete turn around in one year, and pretty much stopped singing and acting and finally said, “I’m going to be a dancer.” A year later I decided I was going to be a choreographer because that was where my talents were most needed. I feel like that was probably the thing I was most confident in, not necessarily someone watching me dance, but someone watching something I created.
I went on So You Think You Can Dance at eighteen as a dancer, just to get my name out there and in the industry because I knew what I wanted to do. I have put in every single day of work to get where I am now. We’re on our fifth year touring with my dance company and there’s so many other journeys, and doors, and paths I’ve gone down inside the choreography realm. This is just one of them, and the one I’m most proud of.
What was your experience like growing up gay in a small town in Virginia and how did your experiences change as you got older?
Everything truly is about balance and figuring out time and place, when it’s appropriate and when it’s not. For me when I was realizing I was gay, I was in public school in Virginia and I had just come from a professional performing arts school in New York so it was a very different environment. I was starting to realize who I was and I saw what was happening to other kids in school and it started to slowly happen to me.
At that time, because I had just come from New York City and I had lived by myself, I knew I had experienced something these kids would never experience. I knew where I was going, and I knew where they weren’t going, and I wasn’t going to let them belittle and bully me. I removed myself from the situation and started homeschooling.
Around the time I didn’t know how to express myself other than lock myself in a room and basically start creating movement and creating pieces about how I was personally feeling because I couldn’t verbally say it. So what I couldn’t do with verbiage, I did with movement and storytelling. That’s basically where I found my knack.
What was your experience like being a gay man on So You Think You Can Dance when you competed on the show in 2006?
When I was on So You Think You Can Dance I was very proud and very loud with who I was, but there were certain things I had to learn along the way. I wanted to be as out as possible, but in 2006 on television, that wasn’t really recommended. I was on a popular dance competition show and the producers told me, you have to remember who’s voting for you; it’s young girls and teenage girls and if you want to be proud of who you are, just keep in mind that you may not go as far as you want to in the competition, because it’s a popularity contest.
That was 2006, obviously things are a lot different nowadays, but this was when these shows were first starting to come out and relied on voting from the general public. So with those things in my head, it definitely stunted my personality on television and it was something I struggled with because I felt like I couldn’t truly be myself. I had to filter what I was saying, and how I was coming across and that kind of put a wall between me and the camera. People would say, “Oh he doesn’t have a personality,” but it’s because I had to be a filtered version of myself. So I just relied on my dancing instead to speak for me.
Obviously things have evolved in different ways and things are more accepted now than they were 12 years ago. Since then I’ve been unapologetic in saying this is who I am, this is what I’m going to do and I’m going to create LGBTQ work. I’m going to put pieces together that speak to me and my story.
Shaping Sound is a dance troupe you’ve been involved in for a while and you’re bringing your new show “After the Curtain” to the King Center for the Performing Arts in Melbourne. What can audiences expect?
The show I’m bringing to Melbourne is a story between two men. It’s a story about losing the one you love before you’re able to say “I love you,” because you weren’t comfortable realizing what love was at that time. It’s really beautiful to be able to tell the story in front of audiences every night.
The story is about this one guy who’s basically being pulled apart by everything in his life, like his work, his relationships, his inner self, his family, his mental illness, and his friends. This guy is basically being torn to shreds, and two years ago when I was thinking of where the show was going, this is where my life was. I was being pulled by the seams by everything around me and I felt like the only thing people cared about was the creative pieces I was creating, not necessarily me as a human. The idea behind it is to show what happens after the show, when the curtain falls. What happens to the creator? From there I dramatized this story based off of my friends, my family.
We have a lot of kids come see our show all across the United States and it’s beautiful to to be able to tell this story, with no words being spoken onstage, by using purely movement. We are teaching and exposing kids to a lot. The comments I hear after the show are things like, “the show was great, but I’m going to have to explain a lot of things to my kid on the way home.” And I’m glad, parents should be talking to their kids about these things.
It’s a tragic love story, it’s heartbreaking, it’s really beautiful and it’s very bold.
How is “After the Curtain” different from other things you’ve done?
There are no boundaries, there are no barriers, there are no more walls. It’s unfiltered and completely vulnerable passion on stage. A lot of times when you’re creating work you’re delivering someone else’s vision, but this show is basically my world.
We dive into domestic issues and a lot of things people are going through today, and to be able to see that onstage, it helps people deal with their own lives. They can escape the world they live in for two seconds and that’s what I love about live theater, it’s an escape.
We suck the energy out of the theater the moment the show starts, and you’re completely enthralled by this two-hour silent film told through dance.
You’ve accomplished a lot at a really young age, so what’s next?
I plan to get married within the next year. I’ve been engaged for two years now, and with my fiance for seven, so it’s time we got married.
In the next five years my goal is to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars so I’m working towards that.
Photo by Mat Hayward.
Travis Wall’s SHAPING SOUND, After the Curtain will be at the King Center for the Performing Arts in Melbourne Saturday, Feb. 10 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 and are available at KingCenter.com.
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