INTERVIEWS WITH SONYA TAYEH AND BILLY BELL December 10, 2009
Okay, here are the interviews I did with Sonya Tayeh and Billy Bell last week at the DeMa Dance Company rehearsal. (Bell and Tayeh are most known for their work on So You Think You Can Dance, if you don’t know - Bell was on the show briefly at the beginning of the season and had to withdraw due to illness, and Tayeh is a choreographer). I spoke with them very quickly, during their tiny lunch break, and I shared the interview with a writer from Dance Spirit magazine. It was hard to get everything down (especially with Billy, who is a fast talker!) and remember the other writer’s questions, etc. (I intend to get a flip camera for the future). Anyway, it’s hard to put this in a question / answer format, so I’m just going to summarize and paraphrase what they each said. Billy was so sweetly enthusiastic and excited about his life. So much fun to talk to! First things first - SYTYCD, since that’s how most people know him. He said he definitely plans to return to the show next season. The producers told him he’ll be automatically advanced to the top 100 - so he’ll start out at the Vegas auditions and go from there. He had to leave the show at the beginning of this season after being diagnosed with Mononucleosis. The problem wasn’t that he was contagious any longer by the time he was diagnosed, but that the illness had significantly enlarged his spleen, and he even had to be hospitalized. Doctors told him if he moved too much with his spleen so enlarged, he could have ruptured it and died. It would likely take a few months for the spleen to return to normal size, they said, which is why he had to leave the show at that point. Now, it’s nearly back to normal though it’s still a slight bit enlarged. “That’s why I wasn’t really dancing full-out,” he said with a little laugh, referring to the rehearsal we’d just seen. Dance Spirit woman and I nearly fell off the couch at this. “If that wasn’t full out, I can’t imagine what you normally look like!” she said. And I agreed. He seemed completely healed to me, to make a massive understatement. I asked him how he got started in dance. He said he started late, in high school, and he actually began with Hip Hop. His lack of early training didn’t matter for that dance because, unlike ballet for example, the movement isn’t codified. But he soon became interested in Jazz, for which he needed ballet training. He initially learned by mimicking movement, but he soon enrolled in the ballet academy at Ballet Florida and, in order to make up for lost time, really threw himself into it, moving very close to the studio and taking several hours of dance per day, along with his other studies. After a while of ballet, he became interested in tap, and so began training in that too. He’s interested in multiple dance forms but considers his main style to be contemporary ballet. I asked him who his favorite dancers were or if he had any particular heroes or sources of inspiration. He immediately named Andrea Miller, choreographer and director of Gallim Dance, whom he called his “personal mentor.” He’s worked with her before - when he was 18, his first pro experience — and he performed her work at the Joyce SoHo. He loves her approach to movement and how she teaches: she wants you to experience the movement in your body, he said; it’s not just about the positions, but about how the movement makes you feel. He’s excited to be able to work with her again at Juilliard; she’s to set a piece there soon. I asked him what other choreographers or companies he’d like to work with. In addition to Gallim, he named William Forsythe and Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva. He finds in this “dance theater” an outer simplicity and yet so much complexity behind it. “What’s going on inside you - (with Gallim and Naharin’s Gaga training) - is simple and yet so complex.” He would also love to do some Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Jerome Robbins, to name a few. But his biggest passion: choreographing. He wants to dance while he’s young but eventually his goal is to create dances. He said with a laugh that he loves “destroying ballet” - kind of bending those rods ballet dancers seem to hold up their spines and freeing them up, allowing them to go back and forth between different kinds of movement. He loves being able to work with dancers and bring certain things out in them. He strives to move people emotionally, to move the audience, he loves having that power. He choreographed his first piece — 15 minutes long — at Dreyfoos, his high school back in Florida. It was performed there at a show in January. But that’s in the future. In the meantime, he’s finishing up at Juilliard (he’s about halfway through his BFA; has another couple years to go), he has the SYTYCD Vegas auditions coming up next season, he’s participating in a choreographic competition that travels throughout the States, and he just became a principal dancer at DeMa this month. Despina Simegiatos, one of the artistic directors of DeMa, says back when she was looking for strong male dancers for her fledgling company, she found him on YouTube, through some videos he’d posted, and really fell for him. He hadn’t yet gone on SYTYCD. He’s excited about working with DeMa because it’s a company that seeks to fuse the creative with the commercial. Companies are where artists can focus on their creative work, but commercial work is what pays the bills. In an ideal world these would be fused, but in the U.S. they rarely are, he said. He seeks to be able to transition back and forth between the two. He’s excited about working with Sonya because he was just about to work with her before he had to leave the show. A couple of other Juilliard students are also dancing with DeMa, which makes the company feel homey to him. He sweetly said he considers himself the luckiest person in the world that he gets to do what he loves and get paid for it.
覺得Legacy和Kathryn有好些共同點--嗓音高、容易激動,所以應該是相當有靈犀的一對。初時對Kathryn幾乎完全沒有印象,漸漸才發現她就是那個公布20強名單那一集里情緒激動起來聲音就會越提越高的那個女孩--當時覺得那簡直滑稽得不真實,心想這女的應該不會待很久。Legacy也一樣,開始的時候除了幾個高難度動作外其他部分都偏弱,學舞也并不靈巧,幾乎被淘汰,入選了20強以后也不被看好,但我想也是時候承認我看走眼了。這兩只放在一起,感覺硬是很對。套用某博主的一句,you can tell they truly support one another in their crybaby ways,這一句把我萌倒了。