For Griffin Moore ’26, performance has never fit neatly into one category.
Though performance has been part of his life since childhood, Griffin speaks about his early experiences with striking humility. His parents, he said, involved him in dance and theater from a young age, “not in the way of, ‘You’re going to be a dancer [or] you’re going to be an actor,’ but just as a way for them to engage with me.” Through church programming, parent-child classes, and, later, formal dance training, he gradually found his way into performance. What feels most compelling about his approach to the arts is how fully dance and theater have come together to shape his identity.
In theater, Griffin often thinks about characters and their psychology. “When I’m on stage for theater, I’ve got all of these processes running in my head where I’m thinking, ‘Okay, who am I right now? What’s my motivation?’” he said. “All of the acting training we do here really emphasizes psychology — the Stanislavski and Uta Hagen style of thinking deeply about a character’s inner life and motivation.”
In dance, by contrast, he begins with momentum and the body’s relationship to space. Griffin described dance as a form where awareness extends outside one’s body. “I’m using my kinesphere [personal space “bubble”] — using my senses to sort of reach my awareness into the world around me,” he said. “In a lot of ways, everyone dancing together becomes a sort of one unified character, because we’re all reaching out to each other on that more sensory, primal, physical level.”
With training in both disciplines, rather than pulling him in separate directions, theater and dance continually blend in his work, each expanding the way he understands performance. “To me, [the two forms] are not two distinct disciplines,” Griffin said. “I think my experience as an actor makes me a much better dancer, and I think my experience as a dancer makes me a much better actor.”
Over time, the two have become impossible for him to separate. “If I say, ‘Hi, my name’s Griffin, I’m a dancer,’ the subtext is ‘dancer with a theater background and a theater focus.’” He added, “If I say, ‘Hi, my name’s Griffin, I’m an actor,’ the subtext is ‘with more of a dance inclination.’ The two aren’t really separable to me.” One sharpens his attention to interior life and motivation; the other deepens his awareness of sensation, space, and connection through the body.
That inseparability is especially visible in the way Griffin talks about storytelling. For him, movement is not an accessory to narrative; it is often where narrative begins. “I love using my body for storytelling,” he said. “I’m actually very uncomfortable just working with text, and if I am given just text, I find a way to involve my body and movement basically as soon as possible.”
That notion is central to Griffin’s work: he is an artist who thinks through motion. Even when starting from a script, language, or character, he returns to the body as a way of discovering meaning. In his practice, performance is something felt, carried, and communicated physically.
That focus on sensory connection explains why Griffin is drawn to work that feels playful and alive, at a time when much contemporary performance leans toward seriousness and intensity. “I think there’s a lot of excitement right now about doing very serious performances, very intense performances, very current, or relevant performances with a lot of scale or impact,” he noted. “I do think that’s really, really important,” but, he added, “almost as a response to that, I find myself reaching for work that feels playful, sort of for the sake of itself, and that is funny and light without being insubstantial.”
That distinction matters.
Griffin is not arguing for art that is shallow or disposable. “I’m not looking to create fast-food, easy-consumption type work,” he said. “But I am looking to create work that is enlivening and fulfilling and leaves an audience feeling energized.” For him, lightness can still hold depth. Playfulness is not the absence of meaning, but another route toward it. In a moment when performance can often feel compelled to prove its relevance through darkness or urgency, Griffin makes a compelling case for joy, play, and tenderness as serious artistic values in their own right.
That same openness has also shaped the path he found at Swarthmore. Though dance and theater had always been part of his life, he never imagined pursuing them as a career before college. “When I was looking at colleges, I wasn’t looking at colleges for their theater or dance departments,” he said. “My one requirement was that wherever I went needed to have a theater building and a theater program, so that I could continue doing this for fun. I fully intended to stop dancing when I got to college and to let theater become a hobby.”
After taking a lighting class and then designing for a senior cabaret, he began to understand tech as both creatively fulfilling and professionally viable: “I realized this is something I do really enjoy,” he said. “It’s another form of theatrical artistic expression.”
After that, Griffin imagined a clean split: performing for joy, lighting for future employment. But over time, even that distinction dissolved. “Especially this year, I’ve been realizing that’s kind of ridiculous,” he said. “The two are inseparable for me. Every time I’m acting, I’m peeking up at the lights, and every time I’m doing lights, I’m sort of gazing longingly at what the actors are doing onstage.”
For Griffin, dance feeds theater, theater feeds dance, performance feeds design, and design feeds performance. Rather than choosing one path over another, he has built an artistic practice shaped by overlap. What stands out most in the way Griffin talks about his work is not just the range of what he does, but the care and sincerity he brings to it.
Across dance, theater, and design, he is drawn to work that invites audiences not just to think, but to feel more awake to the world around them. After participating in more than fifteen performances at Swarthmore, Griffin continues to bring that same energy to the stage. Audiences who recently saw him on the mainstage in “Bartók’s Monster” can also look forward to seeing him in the Senior Dance Concert on April 11-12, as well as in the Spring Dance Concert on May 1-2.
