Dave Robbins

Accompanist

Hometown: Richmond, VA // Joined: 2012

David C. Robbins, M.M., has been an accompanist at Richmond Ballet since 2012. Each season, he performs in a dozen or more concert series with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra in Norfolk, either as a keyboard soloist or section leader, such as in Beethoven Lives Upstairs or the Harry Potter Live! series. Although he has not played it in Richmond, he has played celeste in over thirty Nutcracker performances during our annual Norfolk Nutcracker tour while serving in his role as pianist with the Virginia Symphony. Mr. Robbins knew nothing of dance until around 2008 when he collaborated with Urbanity Dance, a modern dance company in Boston, as a member of a new music ensemble in the early part of his post-graduate school career. At the suggestion of one of the Urbanity dancers, he took a job accompanying classes one afternoon per week at the Philips Academy at Andover. Soon, he added classes at the nearby Boston Ballet School, and before long, he was accompanying classes five hours per day, six days per week. Nobody was more surprised than he that he was suddenly a full-time ballet accompanist, because until that time, he had never even seen a ballet, not even The Nutcracker. While working at Boston Ballet, Mr. Robbins sometimes collaborated with modern dance faculty in performances with outside companies, like DanceVisions in Cambridge, performing solo piano works by Hector Villa-Lobos, John Cage, as well as a reinterpretation of Balanchine’s famous Serenade arranged as a pas de deux accompanied by two pianists.