Daily Inspiration: Meet Kayla Mallari

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kayla Mallari.

Kayla, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started dancing at a studio when I was 3 years old, following in the footsteps of my older sister. We grew up together training in ballet, jazz, tap, and contemporary, and competed and performed with our studio’s company. I started booking professional gigs when I was 15 years old, and when my sister decided to move down to L.A. to pursue a professional dance career I joined her at the age of 20. I would spend the next six years working in the L.A. dance industry, dancing in music videos, commercials, and various stage shows.

In 2010 I discovered the SoCal Hip Hop community: the origin of numerous dance crews like Kinjas, Jabbawockeez, and Quest Crew. I joined a few teams and competed with them before I co-founded my own project crew with a fellow dancer in 2013. We were both women of color and passionate to lead in a male-dominated environment, so when we competed in the Maxt Out Hop Hop Competition in 2013 we had done so with the intention of it being a novelty performance. We were dancers and we were nerds, so we created a performance that highlighted those aspects. The reception from our performance was so profound that we decided to continue on and see where it would take us, and the result were far beyond what we expected.

Thirteen years later and I am still the director for The Corps Dance Crew, a company that takes anime, comics, and videos game to the stage, crafting performances that combine dance with cosplay to bring beloved characters to life through theater. We’ve performed all over the West Coast, having the honor to take to the stages for San Diego Comic Con, Anime Expo, and WonderCon. We’ve built a beautiful community through social media and streaming, connecting dancers in fandoms across the globe, and the crew continues to grow and expand each day. I’ve continued to dance professional while running the crew–working consistently in a split between industry work and theme parks performances–but it’s with The Corps that I get to embark on new adventures of dance, expression, and creativity!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has definitely been a bumpy road, and I think that really goes for anyone and everyone. Any person with a goal is met with challenge after challenge, and it’s in conquering these obstacles that we learn more about ourselves and earn knowledge from the experience. It’s an overtly positive viewpoint, to be sure, but no less true!

As a Filipino female in the dance industry I’ve had to deal with small pockets of racism and micro-aggressions that, in the moment, weren’t too dire or ground breaking; but in the grand scheme of things they did set me back a step or two, and recovering from that stumble was also difficult. I was often told I wasn’t conventionally pretty, nor did I possess the right features to make me appear ‘Asian enough’, which meant I would lose out on gigs solely because I didn’t properly fulfill the diversity casting. It motivated me to build more skills, to make myself invaluable to a project so that my appearance could be ‘overlooked’ for my talent and skill. It was a mental game though, because I would often find myself in projects or positions where I felt like I had to do extra work in order to stand in places where others did not have to do half the things I had to in order to get there.

As a director for my crew, I found that there were so many situations where I was treated very, very different because I was a woman. Organizers or vendors would make passive aggressive comments when they were introduced to me and found out the director of a cosplay dance crew was a woman, and I’ve had a handful of business meetings grow tense when men would make comments that I found were unprofessional and at the expense of my identifiable gender.

My crew as a whole has also had to weather challenges that have hurt the team both professionally and personally. We’ve always been a fully inclusive crew, and in the cosplay community we have always advocated that “Cosplay is for everyone”. Over the years we have had to stand with each other against blatant and hurtful racism, body-shaming, and cyberbullying, as well as harassment and slander from disgruntled individuals when our inclusion did not allow for their personal ethics of exclusion to take place, (yes, that absolutely has happened in the past!)

But like I said, these experiences teach us so much, even if they are lessons we don’t exactly want to learn. Every step back is hard to recover from, but it’s in pushing through those additional 3 steps forward that tell us the most about ourselves, and I’m happy to say I don’t stop walking forward any time soon.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Being the director of a cosplay dance crew is definitely not my profession and just my passion, and with that comes a slew of crazy caveats!

I don’t get paid for what I do, but I put more work into The Corps than even my actual jobs. I’m the director, the scheduler, one of the main choreographers, the artistic head, the lead seamstress, and the manager all in one. And because we’re a cosplay dance crew we run into so many obstacles both as performing artists, (dancers are the hardest working bottom step of the entertainment industry, and you’d be hard-pressed to convince me otherwise!), and as cosplayers. There was no predecessor or model for me to fashion the crew after, so we literally were blazing a trail that never existed. Trying to figure out how we can be used at comic and anime conventions, at special events, for companies and without companies, has been like navigating the sea without a compass: often times organizers would come up to me and tell me they loved what we did, but they didn’t know how to utilize us, which meant I would have the delightful task of having to fashion a list out of thin air of ways we could contribute to a show, convention, event, etc. All this has pushed me to be more than just a dancer; I’ve had to find and learn skills I never knew I had because we’re not a huge organization, so we can’t afford a full team of people. It’s just my 17 person crew and myself against bigger companies, and we do our best to stay afloat and relevant!

Which is also why I’m so proud of The Corps had what I’ve crafted there. What we’ve build together has been organic and real from day one; sweat from our brows and creaks in our knees and we try to push forward in a non-existent corner of the industry. We’re unique in the sense that we’re not creating our shows simply because we were hired to build this theme or that. We are nerds who create nerdy things because we are genuinely part of that nerdy fandom! It’s made us a safe space for the outliers, for the people that truly embody our slogan of ‘for the love of the art and the nerd in our heart’. And it’s on that moniker that we’ve built a wonderful reputation in our anime and comic community! People know that when The Corps comes out to perform, it’s going to be a set that is crafted from a show or a video game that the dancers all love, all understand, and have all researched as thoroughly as they can. We study the characters and portray them with as much authenticity as possible, and when we craft our shows it’s so satisfying to hear the audience reaction when jokes or quips are made that only someone within the fandom would understand.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
If I’m honest, I think what’s most important to me is also what has set back any great strides of success I could have.

In the hopes of not sounding too self-righteous, I do have a very particular ethical code that I adhere to, and it’s meant that I have lost out on A LOT of opportunities. I’ve said no to opportunities that would have benefited me but would have set others up for an unwarranted setback, and even if I had the wherewithal to turn the opportunity down, someone else would take it and people would still be set up for the setback.

The thing is, if I had compromised my code for the sake of progression and personal success, I would have genuinely regretted it. Absolutely no one climbs a mountain alone, so why would we step on people on our way up when we all need to help each other out in the end?

Pricing:

• Crew performances: Starting at $350 per set

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @kay_lamallari @thecorpsdancecrew
• Youtube: @The Corps Dance Crew
• Other: TikTok: @The Corps Dance Crew. Twitch: @TheCorpsDanceCrew

Image Credits
Bridgerton at SDCC (photo with the dresses): @Seb_stills