When Robin Harris opened the email notifying her that she was being honored for her lifetime contributions to North Carolina dance, her first thought was, “Wow; have I lived a lifetime already? I’ve got so much more to do!”
Harris, director of the NC State Dance Program, will receive the 2014 Annual Award from NCDA, the North Carolina Dance Alliance, one of the most prestigious arts awards in the state.
In addition to directing the dance program, Harris is artistic director of the NCSU Dance Company, which has been recognized for excellence many times on both the regional and national levels by the American College Dance Association. She has choreographed more than 30 major works and has received two North Carolina Arts Council fellowships, the Raleigh Medal of Arts and an Indy Award from Indy Week, among other honors and awards.
Footloose
Interestingly, this leader in the world of dance did not grow up as one of those children who spent all her time in a tutu and dreamed of being a ballerina.
“I grew up in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia, where dance and art were not very prevalent,” Harris says. “But I was always a mover, very physical.”
She went on to college at Ohio State and majored in French, and on the way to her degree she decided to satisfy one of her P.E. credits by taking a modern dance class.
“That’s how I fell in love with dance,” she says. “Ohio State has an amazing dance program, which was just a coincidence that I benefited from. If I hadn’t had that experience, I probably wouldn’t have gone into dance as a career at all.”
Harris finished her French degree and went on to get an M.A. in dance at Ohio State. Later she moved to Raleigh because she knew she wanted to teach in a college or university, and the Triangle area had just received top rankings as a great place to live in the newly published Places Rated Almanac series. First Harris taught dance at Enloe High School in Raleigh, and then she came to NC State in 1986. She started small, teaching just one modern dance class at first. In 1987 she founded the NCSU Dance Company, and in 1990 the dance program was included with the other arts programs that now make up ARTS NC STATE.
Today the program offers four dance classes for course credit as well as a variety of master classes on a range of dance topics throughout the year. The program administers two student dance companies: the NCSU Dance Company and the Panoramic Dance Project, with the latter under the artistic direction of Tara Z. Mullins, assistant director of the dance program.
Gotta Dance!
The NC State Dance Program occupies an unusual place within the university because NC State has no dance major.
“Our students are getting degrees in everything that NC State has to offer,” Harris says. “A lot of them could have gone into dance, but they also happen to be engineers or mathematicians or textiles majors.”
So why would an engineer take a dance class or join a dance company?
“Because, for them, dance supports who they are in the world,” she says. “They’re engineers, but they’re also dance artists, and they need their art form to express themselves fully, to organize their perspectives on the world around them and be a whole human being.”
The university may not have a dance major, but that doesn’t stop the dance program from emphasizing the centrality of art in everything it does.
“The art is the core of what we teach,” Harris says. “And the value of that method has been proven time and time again in terms of regional and national recognition.”
Since 1991, the American College Dance Association has selected the NCSU Dance Company to perform in 16 regional gala concerts and eight national gala concerts — an impressive record for any dance company.
“Our company has gotten into the national galas more often than some schools that have undergraduate majors and graduate programs in dance,” Harris notes. “Our method works.”
Fame
Harris is grateful for the recognition that comes with the NCDA honor, but she has little time to sit around contemplating awards. She’s deep in rehearsal for the dance program’s fall concert, coming up on Nov. 20 and 21 at 8 p.m. in the Titmus Theatre in Thompson Hall. After that, preparations begin for the Panoramic Dance Project concert on March 26 and 27, and the NCSU Dance Company concert on April 16 and 17. More information about all three concerts is available through ARTS NC STATE at Ticket Central.
Harris’ Annual Award will be presented at the NCDA’s 2014 Community Event, which will be held at the Durham School of the Arts on Saturday, Nov. 22. The all-day event will feature master classes in traditional and modern dance forms, contact improv classes and an NCDA community membership meeting, with free lunch for event attendees. To close the day, an adjudicated showing will feature dance works by North Carolina artists. More information about the NCDA Community Event is available online.
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