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“I tried to share with my
classmates that success isn’t just about getting everything
that you want,” said Glover. “Sometimes you have to fail and
fall and falter, but you get back up and you keep fighting
for what you want and you keep going for your dreams.”
At the time Glover had no
way of knowing that the root of the message he’d given to
his high school classmates would also serve him in his own
journey at Morehouse.
“About a year and a half
in, chemistry just wasn’t clicking for me,” said Glover. “I
don’t remember when the seed was planted in me but we were
basically told as children that a high school diploma was
not enough, and that we weren’t finished with school until
we at least earned a bachelor’s degree. It wasn’t forced on
us but it was highly encouraged and rewarded, and after a
while that ethic became instilled in us and second nature.”
So Glover reassessed his
objective, and switched his major to math. “Something I
always enjoyed and was good at,” he said. Math was the skill
that he knew wouldn’t fail him. “There are certain things
that I consider gifts,” said Glover. “It’s my ability to
take mathematical information, and retain that information,
process it, and explain it to someone else.”
Glover was back on track
academically. And then came the dancing.
On a whim, he says, he
joined a dance troupe “Just for kicks. I felt old because I
started so late,” he said. “But most of the people who are
gaining notoriety are in my age group.”
And for the next two
years, he travelled and performed with the ensemble
throughout the state of Georgia. He’d found his niche and
began training technically in jazz and ballet before joining
the Spelman Dance Theater Company and being promoted to
principal dancer.
Glover graduated from
Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Science degree in
mathematics, and in 2009 he found himself back in Toledo.
He described his last year
at Morehouse as “A faltering year that was very tough. I
needed somewhere to go where I had support and a safety
net.”
And it’s here in Toledo
that his life as a dancer and his life as a teacher begin to
intertwine.
“I want all of it,” Glover
said. “Whether people remember me as Dom, Domonique or Mr.
Glover, as a dancer, I want people to say ‘he performed from
his heart and I loved performing with him.’ And as a
teacher, I want my students to say that I was tough on them,
‘but he helped me understand math. I didn’t get it before,
but now I understand why.’”
As a math teacher, the
fluidity he cultivates as a dancer helps him see and address
the hurdles that affect his students.
“Many of the barriers that
I see in my math students, regardless of ethnicity, are the
stats that affect their learning abilities and are out of
their control,” said Glover. “When kids can’t get to school
on time, or have homework and their parents are working or
busy and can’t help, it has an impact on learning.”
And as a dancer and
instructor, Glover knows the benefits that discipline and
hard work can bring when life is tough. He talked about his
most memorable role as lead dancer in Stravinsky’s
production Rite of Spring. “We had to walk around and
dance on the apron. That’s the part of the stage that nobody
really wants to touch because it’s a small lip on the stage
and you’re out of the light. It represented everything that
I was going through in my life at the time and culminated
into one emotional, meaningful, moment for me.”
What’s next for Domonique
Glover? More auditions and an upcoming role in Cabaret.
“And hopefully in the very near future I’ll be able to do
more productions outside of Toledo,” he said. He’d also like
to see a greater push for the arts in black and Hispanic
communities.
And then there’s the
teaching, of course, which will include a teaching role, for
him, in the Toledo Ballet’s After School dance
program at the Boys & Girls Clubs beginning October 2017.
Dancing, instructing,
teaching … a future as bright as it ever was!
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