Kele Roberson: ‘I always try to be as honest in my approach as I can’

Back to rehearsals

Kele took an active teaching part in the NDT Summer Intensive, an annual two-week summer course for young (pre-)professional dancers from all over the world, organized by NDT. He has been doing this for a number of years now and again loved every moment of it. He likes teaching. “It’s so informative to suddenly find myself on the ‘other side of the room’ — teaching and guiding rather than dancing — I quite enjoy trying to find ways for things to make sense and sharing them. I also find it so valuable in informing my experience as a dancer when returning to it. It deepens my relationship to detail, to clarity, as well as my awareness of the energetic contributions within a creative environment.” The course ended with an Open Night at Amare on 8 August, and now Kele is all set to start rehearsals for NDT1’s ’26–’27 season. The first performance features a brand new work by Hofesh Shechter as well as Gabriela Carrizo’s The missing door of 2013.

‘Who knows where that will bring me’

Kele’s father was a musical theatre performer. “When I was about eleven, he was performing in a production of The Lion King, which took us on tour around the US. I was entranced by the fantasy of what I saw. After close to two years of touring, we ended up in Austin, Texas, and this is where I took my first formal classes.” Kele was about to attend the Juilliard School in New York City to continue his professional training when a teacher suggested he take part in the summer course of the Royal Ballet School (RBS) in London. At the end of that course, he was offered a place at the school and he decided to take it. “I thought, who knows where that will bring me.” 

Moving to London meant quite a change. “I had been training in various dance styles, quite a wide range. But at RBS the focus is primarily on classical ballet. I knew that would be challenging. You might say that I went to London to feel uncomfortable and to learn and grow from that. And I feel I did learn a lot – I had wonderful teachers and then just being able to see the incredible Royal Ballet company at work was hugely inspiring and motivating. There was much to learn, classically, but I would also sometimes go to local studios in my spare time to take open classes to move differently, access some different channels .” What did Kele’s RBS teachers think of that? He smiles. “I didn’t ask. I kind of just did it. I think a part of me was maybe missing a few other colours in my expression.” Kele was told that he had the potential to pursue a career as a classical dancer. “But I felt I wanted to express myself differently. I was looking for less clear and binary narratives, less clear boundaries, for the more ambiguous, a bit more space for creative interpretation and agency in my input but also for what could emerge.” 

In his final year at RBS, he choreographed a solo he could use for an NDT audition. The work was not only well received when performed at RBS’s annual Summer Performance, it also opened the door for him at NDT. In 2019 Kele embarked on a new creative journey. This will be his eighth season with NDT – his seventh year in The Hague.

Choreography

Kele can see himself as a choreographer. “I’ve apparently been organizing people in space since I was very small, telling my mother to go here and my grandparents to stand there, then move there, making compositions.” In January 2018, while still at RBS, Kele won the Ursula Moreton Choreographic Award for his choreography Introspection. 

Since joining NDT, he has also taken part in many editions of the company’s annual charity event Switch, an evening full of surprises, produced and choreographed by the dancers. “Switch has, with each edition, helped me find my way in discovering what I'm interested in, my inclinations, how I like to be, creatively – but since we’re doing it all in our spare time, alongside performances and rehearsals, it can be a bit of a marathon. Though this is the spirit of Switch, it would be nice to at some point have a bit more time, and hopefully, eventually to have more opportunities to make.” 

Kele is fascinated by the choreographic process and individual choreographers’ approach. “It’s great to work with people in a repertoire context, reviving an existing piece, but it’s always quite thrilling to be involved in the creation of something new.” He is very excited to be part of Hofesh Shechter’s new work and hopes to someday connect further to or work with artists such as Sharon Eyal, Jermaine Spivey, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Saburo Teshigawara, Kenzo Kusada – dancers and choreographers he also greatly admires. 

Two creative elements he firmly believes in, are dreams and improvisation. “I go into a studio at the end of some working days — to find further understanding from the day, return somewhere, though sometimes just to find and feel something totally other. Dreams can be another version of this ‘yes – and’, a subconscious and adaptive state that I’m realizing I crave. They also sometimes bring me this ‘something other’ – images and logic to carry over into my own creative practice. I find my state of mind in both of these places is always some form of echo of my state in life.”

What if?

Musing about what he would like to give to the audience, Kele says, “Dance touches everybody in a different way. I think I’m always trying to be as honest in my approach as I can. I think there’s something really powerful about the intersection of our imagination’s surrealism, and the pursuit of genuine intention and deep feeling — those, as driving forces, hold so much potential for nuance in what someone carries away from their experience of dance. The hope is to create something that touches someone’s subconscious, recalls a memory, revives an emotion, turns some little soul gears. Something almost spiritual, maybe. I like to think of it as an empathetic dreamscape.”

What if he won the Piket Art Prize in his category? “I’m always wanting to make, so it would likely go towards a project of some kind, or perhaps towards a music software course. I generally improvise my way through building music for things in Garageband — the current software of choice — but I definitely think it could soon be time to update the tools and know-how.”

Photo: Eliza-Sophie Sekrève
Text: Anna Beerens