Yet, at 47, Gregory Robinson still has it.
He proved that this month when he came out of dancing retirement to portray a vigorous Lord Capulet in the Dayton Ballet's presentation of Romeo and Juliet at the Victoria Theatre.
For a decade ending in 1991, Robinson was the company's leading male dancer.
For the past six years, he's been associate artistic director.
As much as he enjoyed performing again , and hearing the compliments afterwards from some who had never seen him perform, he'll keep his regular day and night job, thank you.
“I enjoyed my dancing career. I loved being on stage again. But if I'm prideful about anything, it's that I'm contributing to the history of this company in another way now. I'm giving back,” he said.
For those close to the Dayton Ballet, his presence in a world of pink and white tights - and skin - is a given. It hasn't always been that way for him.
He's never had his photograph on the cover of Time or Newsweek, or been recognized as a black dance pioneer, but Robinson is one. At almost exactly the same time Arthur Mitchell was founding the world's first all-black classical ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Robinson was taking his first dance class in an even tougher neighborhood - the University of Alabama.
Only six years after George Wallace stood on the university steps to prevent enrollment of the first black student at the college, Robinson was chosen to dance a solo there wearing not much more than a loincloth.
“I was the first guy to ever dance on a program there, and I was the first black man to dance there,” he said, without a hint of anger or political defiance.
The soft-spoken and self-described introvert had studied music and played the clarinet for 10 years, but shortly after he arrived at the university, his musical instruments were stolen from his dormitory.
A friend who later became the first black homecoming queen at the school and was crowned by Wallace, urged him to sign up for a dance class.
During his first class, the teacher asked him how long he had studied dance. “For about 20 minutes, I told her, and she told me to come to the office afterwards,” Robinson recalls. The rest is history.
But it's also black history.
Not long after, he went to New York to audition for summer dance scholarship opportunities. A director at the Harkness House for Ballet Arts told him he was “all wrong anatomically. She said my buttocks would never conform to the ideals of classical ballet,” Robinson said.
“It hurt a lot to remember that later, but at the time I was dazzled by that world. For all they knew, I was from Hooterville. But it didn't crush me. It didn't stop me.”
It wasn't the only time he would be informed how wrong he was for ballet, but he was also told many times that he was right. His teachers in Birmingham, and Stuart Sebastian were among those who encouraged him the most.
Robinson was dancing with Ballet UAB on the campus of the University of Alabama at Birmingham when Sebastian was brought in on a grant to choreograph for the company.
When Sebastian was named artistic director of the Dayton Ballet in 1980, he asked Robinson to audition here.
“Twenty years later, I'm in the walls here,” said Robinson, who lives alone in the home he owns in Dayton's historic McPherson Town neighborhood between North Main Street and the Dayton Art Institute.
The oldest of two boys in his family, Robinson attended parochial school for 10 of 12 years.
“If you were a black kid in public school there at that time, you were lucky to get books,” he said.
He played clarinet in the John Carroll High School marching band and the school symphony.
“Music opened the world to me. The dancer I am is because of the musician I was,” he said. “But I've never picked up a clarinet again. From the first time I walked into that dance studio, it was pretty much like walking into home.”
Outside the studio, “if the signs didn't tell you, there were people in Birmingham who certainly would tell you your place. Nothing was hidden. In Dayton today, it's more subtle. If I go outside this building and walk down Main Street, not many people are going to look at me first as Greg Robinson. They're going to see me first as a black man,” he said.
“The older I get, the more I realize that I am a symbol. I've always known that to a certain extent. But once I get to the stage, I never think I'm there to make a social statement. I'm there to uphold the art form.”
One of Robinson's choreographic works, Paganini Variations, will be on the program for the Dayton Ballet's next performances March 23-26 at the Victoria Theatre. He won't be dancing this time, but his influence and his history will be felt.
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