Beyond Performance: Robert Small, Landscape Designer

“Finding myself a beginner again, that was the hardest part,” says Robert Small. Dancer/choreographer/teacher and soloist for nine years with the Murray Louis Dance Company, Small is discussing his new life as a landscape designer. “I had to step out of my comfort zone,” he says, “and start all over.”

A sleek, dynamic dancer, Small earned his BFA at UCLA. He criss-crossed the globe with Murray Louis and developed his own solo program, which he toured widely. From 1990– 92 he joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. While Small was still at his peak as a performer, a friend asked, ”What are you going to do when you stop dancing?”

“I have no idea,” Small replied. “I was still so happy being a dancer. I loved everything about it, except for some cold theaters in South America. I had never really focused on the future.” His friend went straight to her desk and pulled out a brochure for the Conway School of Landscape Design. Nine years later he took another look at that brochure. He had not been injured or fallen out of love with dance, but he was troubled by a moment onstage when his mind had wandered. “I am not here at this moment,” he realized. “That jolted me, because I’d never not been fully present in performance before.”

Though gardening had never been more than a hobby for him, Small signed up for a one-year course in landscape design in 1992. “I found it to be very peaceful and meditative,“ he says. “I was happy to be outside so much after so many years in dark theaters.” After apprenticing himself for five years to a professional designer, he formed his own company, Small Landscapes.

He liked the physicality of gardening, all that bending, lifting, kneeling. “I had to modify my daily workout, to build up the extra strength I needed.” Space, contrast, scale—because of his dance training, those ideas were familiar to him. “It all came quite naturally,” he says.

Dance also prepared him for the social skills needed for launching a business. “All those years of touring, meeting new people, thinking on your feet.” He maintains 15 gardens in Manhattan. “Business is good,” he says. “Better than it ever was in dancing. April–July are the busiest months.” He is up at dawn and works into the night. In November he puts the gardens to bed and begins planning for the spring.

Any regrets? “I miss the ‘high’ of performing, that intensity like nothing else. But now I decide when and where I’m going to work. For the first time I feel that I’m fully in charge of my own life.”

Originally published in Beyond Performance, a supplement to Dance Magazine and Dance Teacher, September 2010