Meet Randall Mella

Today we’d like to introduce you to Randall Mella.

Randall, before we jump into specific questions about your work, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I started dancing at the age of four at a family-run studio where I was learning traditional Filipino dancing and hip-hop. With a growing passion for hip-hop, I set my focus to solely study and immerse myself in the culture of hip-hop. This included attending street cyphers and battles as well as learning hip-hop in a studio that only offered styles of hip-hop (breaking, popping, locking, etc).

With my growing love for it, I became very passionate about a professional career as a dancer and choreographer but my parents weren’t supportive of my dream due to fear of their child working as an artist and assumptions of low income and lack of stability in an artist lifestyle. Because of this after high school I put dance on hold to pursue a career in engineering, believing it would be a stable career while still holding onto my dreams of being a dancer. Dancing less and less each year, I completed three years of engineering but I found myself unhappy with the idea of working as an engineer for the rest of my life. This eventually led to finding myself on academic probation and being forced to take a year off before returning back to education.

While on academic probation, a well-known touring dance competition came into town: World of Dance. With this in place, I gathered a group of friends and entered the competition just to simply familiarize myself with choreographing, creating, and performing again. Because of this performance, I was offered two jobs right away to begin teaching at studios and asked to co-direct a professional dance company in my city and eventually became the beginning of my dance career.

Since then, I have taught at multiple studios, offering workshops as well as choreography for stage. I have competed in world-class competitions such as Hip Hop International, World of Dance, and Artists Emerge. I have performed alongside “Lia Cole” for many music videos and live shows including a tour in Asia. I am currently on set for an upcoming Netflix series “Julie and the Phantoms”.

Dance has always been a part of my life and I am excited to continue my journey through it. I’ve accomplished career goals that I never thought I would complete and I’m looking forward to new experiences and milestones!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Definitely not haha. I do believe it can feel easier depending on your mindset. I find staying positive and focused on my goals helps me through difficult times. But it is definitely a tough road with tons of obstacles, some more obvious than others.

The first obstacle was the pressure of my parents. My decision to pursue dancing over my on-going engineering career was a tough pill for my parents to swallow, especially with three years of engineering education completed. There was a lot of back and forth arguments and discussions about the stability of my career, a lack of university degree, and misunderstandings about the dance industry. I also have two older brothers who at my age now were both finished university and engaged so not living up to the family expectation was an added factor. I was very lucky that my brothers were extra supportive of my dancing to help make up for the lack of support from my parents. Over time, however, my parents eventually began to understand my work and found acceptance after being present for some of my successes. I found that to be very lucky considering even friends in my field still have not received acceptance for their artist career path.

Also with having an art career, there is a lot of expectations to live up to. A lot of my career has to deal with being accepted by the public, an audience, judges, agencies, etc. The expectation I gave myself starting out was to always the best in the room, and I found myself feeling very underwhelmed a lot due to not being able to live up to that expectation. It wasn’t until a more experienced dancer approached me with a new idea: with so many people in this world fighting for the same dream as you, there is always someone better than you at certain things and the most you can do is work on being a better version of yourself daily. With this new idea, I found peace at not being the best in the room but rather being the best that I could be always. This is still an ongoing struggle considering a lot of experiences in the dance industry will test this idea such as auditions and competitions and receiving a lot of “no’s”. But it also calls for a daily reminder to dedicate myself to my craft and staying focussed towards my goals.

It does require a very strong will to succeed but I believe in every career there are hardships. In engineering, my challenges were enduring years of a tough education and in dance, my challenges were surrounded by being able to live up to high expectations of success. It just eventually came clear that I would rather endure the challenges of a dance career because of my love and passion for dance.

Please tell us more about your work. What do you do? What do you specialize in? What sets you apart from competition?
I honestly feel that I do hold a collection of skills which combined makes me very versatile and an incredible asset in the dance industry. The majority of jobs that I do involve choreography for live performances which is where I feel strongest in. However I’ve done all sorts of jobs that I am quite proud of: teaching at a convention in front of over 100 students, performing in stadiums of the capacity within the thousands, dancing on set for a Netflix series, managing and directing a dance company to compete internationally, first-place finishes at dance battles, etc. I can honestly say I’m very proud of the wide range of experiences considering some people do only competitions or only the music industry but I’ve been blessed with multiple opportunities.

Right away I can say that what sets me apart from others is my breaking. The breaking scene and choreography scene are very different spectrums in the dance world because breaking is a freestyle dance which makes it the opposite of choreography. Most boys only ever expose themselves to dance battle events and rarely have the skills to execute choreography in other styles. However, I’ve trained myself in multiple styles well enough to be able to pick up choreography in one style and execute a breaking move to set myself apart from the rest. This becomes an important skill in auditions with so many dancers being great at learning a routine yet struggling to find a way to stand out. My ability in breaking also adds a new layer of creativity and power to my choreography since most people would not create floorwork the same way I could. And combined with years of teaching experience, I’m able to coherently demonstrate and explain my movements so that others can follow and execute correctly.

Another part of my business that I am most proud of is the creation of my own dance company: Cool Giraffes. This company is also the same group that I started my dance career with when we competed at World of Dance. This company has taught me so much about not only dance and choreography but business. Managing payments, fundraisers and budgets, booking multiple hotels and flights, negotiating performance agreements were things I never imagined myself being in charge as someone who initially just wanted to dance and choreography. I do give recognition to my years of university education for teaching me most of my business skills. It also pushed me to choreograph for very high-level competitions with ambitions of making this company known worldwide which lead to some memorable wins at competitions.

I do believe that my wide variety of skills learned from training and work experiences make me someone to really look out for in the industry. I am also still very young but given my work ethic and focus, there is a lot more I plan to accomplish which helps emphasizes why I see myself as a star of this industry.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I think most important quality in anyone’s journey towards success is a great work ethic. There’s a very popular quote with a slight twist that I always keep in the back of my mind: “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard, but if talent works hard then you are DONE”.

I’ve had a lot of experiences and moments where I would think to myself “I’m talented so I deserve this” and then watch as someone as gets what I want. With that happening one too many times made me reflect that if I’m not working harder than the next person, they’ll continue to accomplish the goals I’ve made for myself. The average person works eight hours a day in their occupation because those are the rules they’ve chosen to follow. Being a business owner, I create my own rules which mean no one else is responsible for how many hours I put into my work except myself. Therefore I strongly believe in dedicating eight or more hours to my work at least five days a week.

This work to me can include creating new routines, taking other dance classes, developing my strength and flexibility or even sending out emails, editing music and videos, and creating new opportunities for myself. It’s quite a commitment as this mentality has had me at times working 7 days a week constantly dancing, stretching, emailing while balancing time for food and rest and honestly not a lot of time for play. Although not having time for play is not so much an issue to me because I have a lot of fun doing the work that I do. It’s why I chose this career in the first place because I love being able to dance and create for a living. This makes the hard work seem less like something I’m forcing myself to do and rather just a great way to simply spend my time.

There’s a lot of factors that go into anyone’s success. But the one thing that everyone, no matter who you are, has the power to do is simply just dedicate the time and put in the work. And as obvious this may seem, this can be the determining factor between what some will go out and accomplish and what others will wonder why what they’re missing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwfc7yH_81MThSNqJWbb9Hw
• Phone: 1-780-695-9589
• Email: randallrmella@live.ca
• Instagram: @onecoolgiraffe
• Other: randallrmella@gmail.com

Image Credit:
Romy Young Photography, Hip Hop International.

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