Angela Palladini, originally from California, is a dancer with Same Planet Different World, who came to Chicago initially to join the highly respected Lou Conte Dance Studio scholarship program. Like most of the professional dancers I’ve known, she’s done what seems like a thousand things in Dance; her bio lists seven different dance companies, where she’s either worked, trained or studied, as well as six or seven individual choreographers. This wide-ranging openness to new experiences is certainly a hallmark of the best of the dance community, and it’s a necessary backdrop to understanding how a work like REFLECT can be put together, with such intricate cooperation, by artists who perhaps have never met before.
Angela: “I found out about Thodos’ New Dances from attending last year’s performance, and couldn’t wait to audition this year. … There’s a certain aspect of the New Dances audition that I love, and that’s the opportunity the dancers have to learn a piece of every choreographer’s work. It not only gives the choreographers a chance to appropriately choose their cast, but it gives dancers the experience of having to quickly learn different movement in a short amount of time. These types of experiences are invaluable for the professional dancer. You can think of this audition as a menu of varying appetizers- the dancers get the whole experience by sampling a little bit of everything, and regardless of the audition results, the tasting itself was worth the time.”
It’s interesting that this audition process is part of the way in which Mollie Mock and Jeremy Blair ended up collaborating on this work. The way Mollie explained it to me was that she and Jeremy felt that if they did a combined audition, it would moderate a little the pressure of the day on all of the dancers auditioning. From developing their audition together, they gradually decided to collaborate on a single piece. But Angela’s take on the audition process is also interesting to me, because it’s very much like my own feeling about composing for choreography. Because of the always-new experience of trying to understand the vision of the artist I’m working with, the process itself is worth the time. But my process involves collaborating with one or two people at a time. In this piece, each dancer is collaborating with six other dancers and two choreographers.
ANGELA: “This project is different in that we’re able to work with dancers from several Chicago-based companies and other free-lance artists. In a company setting, we’re typically dancing with the same people all of the time. Granted, your partners and corps dancers may vary on occasion, but we do not get the advantage of getting to know other dancers from different backgrounds.
“Carrie Nicastro and I are in the same company (www.spdwdance.org), but this is my first time dancing with all of the other five dancers. Kurt Adametz and I have never partnered before, and I’m so fortunate to be partnering with him. He has phenomenal awareness (something very important for both partners in the process). Every dancer in this piece makes me excited to come to rehearsal. We all have a wonderful chemistry with each other; we know when to loosen up a little and when to crack down.”
In order for this to be the case requires a tremendous amount of background preparation. Each of these dancers has to be supporting each of the others, and to do that, each of them had to learn thousands of different things before they got to that first rehearsal. That’s why all of those dance companies, and all of those choreographers that Angela’s bio mentions are so much a part of this story. Even so, I would wonder if it’s not more difficult to put all of this together with new people. More interesting, I can imagine, but I would think it would have to make the process more difficult.
ANGELA: “Absolutely not. I love getting the opportunity to work with other dancers I’ve never worked with before. I think each person has unique qualities to bring to the table, ones that everyone can learn from and take with them on their journey through dance”
Although the composition of “Hidden” (the ‘ohana score for REFLECT) took on a broader dimension as it developed, I first thought of the title before I began to tell the story that the final track describes. The title came out of conversations I had with Mollie about what she would be trying to portray in her work, and the idea of “passion” arose repeatedly; while working on the track I thought of the idea of quiet passions, unnoticed passions, hidden passions. When Jeremy and Mollie began working together, they evolved a story line that is remarkably consistent with the story-line that drives the track, almost as if it portrays an individual dimension of that broader story. The Thodos Dance Chicago introduction (www.thodosdancechicago.org) says that “REFLECT reveals the world of hidden passion as a soloist reflects on her past”. I liked this idea as soon as I heard about it, because so much of the passion that makes projects like this successful is hidden. It’s hidden in the demanding day-to-day routines that dancers live, but it’s that passion for creative self-expression that makes it possible for them to cooperate with such remarkable ways.
ANGELA: “Inside the studio, I’m all eyes, all ears, all encompassed in the present. You have to be. Outside of rehearsal time, I think about the pieces I’m apart of every chance I get --- on the train, walking to warm-up class, etc. It’s important to do your “homework” by listening to the music and going over the choreography. … There was never a definitive moment that determined my career in this profession. It was something that became apparent over time. I’ve realized the feeling I get while dancing is unlike anything else. I crave it. It’s food, air, everything for me.”
