(l to r) Teddy Forance, Kyle Robinson, Travis Wall and Nick Lazzarini
photographed by Clinton Gaughran for AfterElton
Sitting down with just one of the dancers from the new Oxygen docu-series, All The Right Moves, is one thing but what do you get when you sit down with Travis Wall, Nick Lazzarini, Teddy Forance and Kyle Robinson at the same time? Well, it’s a fun mix of everything. Of course, each of these guys have their own unique blend of cuteness, sexiness and immense dancing prowess, but put them together and you also get an undeniable brotherly camaraderie. They work with their dance company Shaping Sound, laugh and fight together in their shared home and, yes, dance together in life and on the show. We recently grabbed them for a chat (and hot photo shoot!) to talk about their new series.
AfterElton: In doing the show, did it change your relationships at all? You’re all tight and have known each other a long time.
Kyle Robinson: Absolutely. I think it brought us closer because it forced us to be brutally honest with each other. Things that we would normally keep to ourselves and let wash over us, we’ve actually been encouraged to go to that place and address the issues at hand.
Nick Lazzarini: We were the type of friends that would not say anything to each other and then “Meow!” after a month or so and this has caused us, like Kyle said, to get everything out in the open and talk about it and move on, and we can do that because we are so close.
Teddy Forance: I genuinely want the best for everyone but at the same time we fight and argue more than I do with my own brothers.
Nick: Teddy and I fought last night. We wanted to kill each other last night.
Teddy: It was great, though. It’s good for us.
Nick Lazzarini
AE: Did you guys learn things about each other that you didn’t know before from doing the show?
Travis Wall: I think just to a deeper sense. We all knew each other as characters but more in-depth.
Nick: I learned that Travis is very skinny and very sexy.
Travis: He is being so stupid…
Nick: And this one [looks to Kyle] is so handy. When he moved into the house, he fixed everything because he didn’t live in the house for a year. We had lived in this house, The Manor, for a year…
Travis: …he was on tour…
Nick: …and we destroyed the house. It was awful. But this one came in and put all new lights in, fixed everything. It was awesome. Tim ‘the tool man’ Taylor over here [points to Kyle].
AE: Did you wear a tool belt? We need pictures of that!
Nick: I wish! [laughs]
Kyle: My tool belt resides at home in Massachusetts, actually. I don’t have it with me.
Travis: He is quite the tool! Just kidding! He’s a great guy!
Kyle Robinson
Travis Wall
AE: So you guys were living together on the show. Were you living together before the show?
Travis: We got our house in December 2010. The thing is, we got approached about the reality show and we started having meetings but we were already in the process of moving in together, so when we went to all these meetings we were like, ‘We just moved in together,’ and then the show took awhile to get so we lived together for a year and a half. All of this – Shaping Sound, the house – everything would’ve happened without the cameras, too. The reality show isn’t…
Nick: …the reason why we came together.
Kyle: It’s not staged or anything and all the drama that comes out in the show is actually all things that have evolved in our friendship and in starting this company together. Nothing is staged.
AE: Have you all danced together before? I know some of you have in competitions but…
Kyle: Ted and I have danced together before. I would go to his summer camp in Western Mass. and he would come to mine at the Gold School and train with my teacher there, so there was a lot of back and forth. I’ve known Teddy for fifteen years now.
Teddy: Out of everybody, I haven’t worked with Kyle before. This was the first time I’ve ever worked on him or with him or danced next to him so this was a new relationship. I knew him as a friend but we never worked together.
Teddy Forance
AE: In watching So You Think You Can Dance and other dance shows, these shows can really change your careers, right? I went to your Shaping Sound shows in LA and I was like ‘There’s Melanie [Moore]. There’s Robert [Roldan]. There’s Allison [Holker].’ I know these dancers from these shows.
Travis: It gives us a face and a household name and that’s what So You Think has done for so many contestants. But it’s what you do with it afterwards. You have to run with it, and some of us have. And especially, if you look at our cast, there’s a lot of people from So You Think but there’s nine seasons so a lot of the best contemporary dancers actually went on that show to get exposure because we do want names for ourselves. We don’t want to be dancing behind Janet Jackson for the rest of our life.
Nick: And the dance world is so small. All the people in our company were friends already pretty much and we’ve all had a relationship with them outside the studio before so that was cool, too. The dance world being so small everybody knows everybody and pretty much all the good dancers kind of flock together.
Teddy: I think the coolest thing that dance on TV has done for the dance world is actually just make it a lot more accessible, because not too many people actually go and look for company performance dates, and with this platform hopefully we’ll actually have more people coming to our shows and sell out weeks of shows like a Broadway show would run. That would be ideal.
Nick Lazzarini
AE: When you and I talked a few months ago, Nick, we talked about some of the other dance reality shows out there. Did those shows also inform what you don’t want to do with your show?
Travis: We had no rules with this show. We are a completely different breed, we had a completely different idea, it’s a completely different concept…
Nick: …and we’re ourselves.
Travis: Yeah. We didn’t go to any guidelines with what not to do. We’re just ourselves and we put our art, our passion and our lives out there.
Kyle: And there are so many ideas, too, that it’s limiting when you put those restrictions of yourself. We don’t want to be like this and we don’t want to be like that. We draw inspiration from everywhere. I think it was Agnes DeMille that said, ‘Don’t show me anything you don’t want me to steal.’ It’s all inspiration and all of it feeds off itself.
Nick: And hopefully people can watch our show and look at how we interact as dancers and how we create. I feel like that’s the best part about our show is that it’s real. It’s not about, like I said before with you, it’s not about all that other crap. It’s about the dancing and that’s it and that, I think, is the best part about the show.
Kyle Robinson
AE: That said, outside of the dancing, do we see more into each of your lives? We see a little bit with the guys teasing Travis talking on the phone with his boyfriend in the first episode but...
Nick: [mocking] Travis, I love you so much…
Travis: You see our confident sides and our vulnerable sides. And surrendering and being vulnerable on camera like that is terrifying a little bit.
Nick: Travis gets…he surrenders a lot. Especially with Dom. [laughs; Travis’s boyfriend is Dom Palange]
Travis: Stop it! You see my Mom, who has a big part in the show. You see Dom and I, which is really cool and I think is really inspiring, too. I’m an open book. We’re all open books on this show.
Teddy: I talk about my feelings way more ever than I have ever in my life, I think, in front of a green screen.
AE: Was that because of the cameras? You were loosened up once you got comfortable?
Teddy: That and they ask questions and they pry, but the feedback we give them is obviously all us, it’s all honest.
Travis: That’s the thing that I learned about reality TV, especially that’s not a competition series but an actual docu-series. They make you talk about your feelings at all times. Every single thing anybody says or does, they want to know how you feel about it.
AE: What are some of the other highlights of the season that we’ll see?
Kyle: There’s a little bit of drama between Ted and I, which up to this point had never happened before.
Nick: There’s definitely drama throughout the season. There’s drama between he and I at first, then he and Taja [Riley]…
Travis: There’s a lot of drama with me and Taja…
Nick: There’s also dealing with injuries and dealing with last minute changes that the dance world happens to have. Not everything is going to be exactly the way you planned it. Sometimes we’re flying by the seat of our pants.
Travis: Our goal is to get the [Shaping Sound] show in LA up and running. That is our first goal and that’s episode six and there are two more episodes after that. What happens is priorities and everyone starts getting split and Shaping Sound gets broken up a little bit. I’ve got a lot of things going on and we’re all being pulled in different directions and it’s ‘What happens to Shaping Sound?’ and that’s really the big, huge cliffhanger in episodes 7 and 8. You get to see us try to come together and put out the fires.
Nick: It’s what is that next step is for Shaping Sound? We get in this limbo…we were on this huge high from the show, and now what do we do? That’s when we kind of go to our separate careers and do our own thing. But then, like Travis said, the cliffhanger is will Shaping Sound continue?
Travis: For us, if you consider what we did for the show, we went into the hole a hell of a lot. We only charged $20. We wanted people to come to the show. We spent $72,000 on that show and made back maybe $20,000.
Nick: We thought we were only going to have to pay like $20,000. [laughs] That didn’t even cover our dancers!
Travis: We put up all the money because we wanted the show to be so grand. We knew we were going to go in the hole with it. But with the exposure of the TV show that it opens up new opportunities and more jobs for us and we can sell tickets for more than $20.
Nick: We put tickets on sale a week in advance because we got the theater literally a week in advance. We sold out! It was incredible.
Teddy: We sold 1200 tickets in a week.
Travis: We broke the record for the Saban Theater for a week’s sale.
Teddy Forance
AE: So would you say there is a cliffhanger at the end of the season?
Travis: I talked to Cat [Rodriguez] yesterday, our showrunner, and they’re trying to keep it a cliffhanger but they don’t want to give the viewers blue balls. [laughs] That’s a terrible way of saying it.
AE: But we all know what you’re talking about.
Travis: They want some victory of some kind at the end.
Nick: It’s like blowing your load and then finding out you got the girl pregnant. ‘Oh no! What’s next?’
[The guys all break into laughter]
Nick: This is AfterElton. They’ll love that!
AE: That’s a great ending. And maybe a great headline.
Nick: ‘Shaping Sound blows its load and then is afraid they’re going to get pregnant!’
Travis Wall
All The Right Moves premieres Tuesday at 9pm on Oxygen.
