Some people have known what they wanted to be ever since they were a kid. 27-year-old Travis Wall was born to dance.
Best known for his work on “So You Think You Can Dance” (SYTYCD), and with his touring dance company Shaping Sound.
“I started dancing since the day that I was born,” Wall says. “My mother was my dance teacher in Virginia Beach and she had her own studio, so I was raised in a dance studio. I started professionally working at the age of 9. I moved to New York City to be in a Broadway show when I was 12. I have ever since then been pushing and striving forward, achieving my dreams that I wanted every day since I was a young kid.”
At the age of 18, young Wall auditioned for SYTYCD, making it as a contestant onto the show and finishing as the first runner-up for season two.
“And then I worked every day after that because I wanted to be a choreographer and come back and choreograph for that show,” Wall says. “They asked me back three years later on season five, and I’ve choreographed every season since then, earning myself four Emmy nominations for my work on the show.
“I really like the work I did this season [on SYTYCD] a lot… There’s [sic] a lot of pieces that got me to where I am today, but I really love the work I did this year. I really loved the Final Four number I did about equality, about us all being treated the same and that love is love. I was taught there was no difference, and it’s so crazy to go around the world and see how much hate there is and how much you are supposed to feel that you are not accepted. That what you have is not real and that you are not worth it. So I did a routine to share my feelings on how we are all the same and that no one is different.”
Wall has been involved in choreography for several VMA numbers, the 2010 Academy Awards and other shows, including a reality show about him and his group of friends who started a danced company back in 2012.
Oxygen aired “All The Right Moves,” which documented how Wall, Teddy Forance, Nick Lazzarini and Kyle Robinson came up with the idea of their dance company Shaping Sound.
“It was like a first experience for everything,” Wall says. “It was the first time we were all living together. It was the first time we were starting a dance company. At the same time, everything was documented on camera. So we were still trying to get used to each other and still trying to figure out how to not push each other’s buttons. And at the same time, we were afraid of who’s going to say something on camera and who’s gonna spark this. It was an awesome experience but at the same time it was such a learning experience.”
The name of the company, Shaping Sound, has a story behind it. Wall says the group wanted to portray the idea that dancers are visual musicians, making music come to life with their bodies. He was on an airplane one day, and he looked outside the window and wondered why there were walls that were just off the runway and shaped upward. He said at first he didn’t understand why the walls weren’t flat but shaped and curved upward, but he then realized it probably was because of the loud engine sound. It takes the sound and shapes it away from the neighborhood—Shaping Sound. He called the other three, and they liked the name too.
It has been almost three years, Wall says, since the show aired on Oxygen and Shaping Sound has evolved in many different ways since 2012. Currently on tour, Shaping Sound has a new show that is being highly received by its audiences.
“The show is about a dream,” Wall says, who explained how the show came from a reoccurring nightmare, “This girl is having a hard time in her real-life, she falls into this dream and is taken on this journey—an imaginable experience. She falls in love in her dream and she realizes in her dream that the love that she has in her real-life and the relationship she has in her real-life is not a good one and she deserves better. She has to take something from the dream that gives her the courage to act.”
One thing that hasn’t changed is the love Wall and his dance company partners have for the art.
“I love hearing that we’re inspiring kids to dance and showing them that they can achieve their dreams if they want to,” Wall says. “At the same time, we’re entertaining people. We’re making people want to go see live dancing and not just see them behind recording artist or just on TV, but actually pay to a theater to pay to watch dance.”
