SPOTLIGHT on - Holliday Rees (C'00)

by Jeff Ward-Bailey, guest feature-writer / photos courtesy of Sherry Hopkins

The following article was originally published in the Principia College Alumni Dance newsletter, Back at the Barre (Issue #9 - March 2011).

It is part of a special series of SPOTLIGHT articles about the dancers who inspired the charcoal drawings that grace the walls of Morey Dance Studio.  (Read the intro here.)

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When Holliday Rees made the decision not to become a dancer, she couldn't have known that she -- or, more accurately, her likeness -- would eventually go on to encourage dozens of Principians to pursue dance.

Let's back up a bit. Holliday's early dance career was defined by a startling focus. She began taking ballet classes when she was just six years old. Her parents also signed her up for ice skating, music classes, and gymnastics, but, she says, "ballet was the thing" for her. She was so taken with it, in fact, that after spending several years taking classes in Oklahoma, where her family lived, she made the decision to move to California so she could continue her training under specialized instruction. She was in eighth grade at the time.

Holliday spent her high school years living with her grandparents in Walnut Creek, California, where she danced at the Twenty Castella studio. Here, she was able to get training and performance experience that wouldn't have been accessible to her back in Oklahoma. "We must have done fifteen Nutcracker [performances] a year," she remembers.

Above right, Rees re-enacting her pose in Morey Dance Studio, ten years later

When she graduated high school, Holliday says, she knew she wanted to continue her dance training. She kept that in mind on her college search, and eventually settled on the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. She spent her freshman year there, but after a ballet tour which took her up and down the East Coast, she opted to audition for the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet company, directed by Paul Mejia. Mejia liked her, she says, and invited her to join the company. The only obstacle? She wasn't trained in the Balanchine ballet style that the company used. So she was asked to attend the company's summer camp, where she could train in Balanchine before moving to Ft. Worth and dancing with the company.

The camp, as it turned out, was located on an island in New York's Adirondacks region -- an island which Mejia himself owned. An island without running water, or electricity. Or music.

"We danced to the pounding of a stick," Holliday remembers. "At night, when we got done, we bathed in the lake. It was cold!" She and ten other dancers spent the summer training in this unlikely location, without music or mirrors. It was at this point that Holliday began to question whether her future held a career as a professional ballerina. "[The summer camp] was a good experience, in a lot of ways," she says, but with its manic pace, body-centric focus, and Spartan regime, "it also opened my eyes to, frankly, some of the neuroses that can come with ballet."

In spite of her doubts, Holliday finished the camp and moved to Ft. Worth, where she danced in the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet company. She was there less than a year, however, before, "it just hit me like a ton of bricks that that [dance] wasn't really what I wanted to do as a profession." She adds, "I still wanted ballet in my life, just not 100 percent of the time!"

Armed with that realization, Holliday made the decision to quit the company, a choice she describes as difficult, but quick. She turned her attention back toward college, intending to attend UCLA. When she found out she wouldn't have been able to balance dance performance with academic work as a business major, though, she turned her attentions to Principia.

Holliday attended Principia thinking at first that she would transfer to UCLA once she was a junior, but quickly fell in love with the college. "I was able to do everything," she says. "Student body, dance, performances, business and soc[iology] classes ... I made great friends too." 

Holliday was part of a tightly-knit group of dancers. "They're still my best friends to this day," Holliday laughs. "We were all very much shaped by the fact that we were dancers, and bonded by that ... I was [also] able to do pas de deux and other styles that I hadn't really done much of before."

It was because of her decision to attend Principia -- in lieu of pursuing a career as a professional dancer -- that, paradoxically, resulted in Holliday becoming a symbol of encouragement for future aspiring dancers. During her senior year, Holliday, along with her group of friends, became the subjects in series of charcoal drawings created by a fellow student.  These pictures then became the basis for a series of large paintings which were hung in Morey Dance Studio.  They are still there today.

Above, Rees, left, and Emily Wakeling at the barre in Morey Dance Studio, June 2010

When Holliday visited the campus for last year's Alumni Dance Production, she found her own likeness -- larger than life -- still hanging on the wall, encouraging dancers to express grace and beauty. "It was so amazingly inspirational and touching," she says. "It shows people that dance is important in this place. [Principia] is a small college and it can't do everything -- but ballet, they take it seriously, and it's so inspirational, and these pictures symbolize that."

After graduation, Holliday moved to New York, where she took a job with Bank of America. Although she continued dancing for a while, the travel imposed by her job prevented her from being able to maintain the discipline needed for ballet. She says people sometimes ask her if she regrets not having ended up a ballerina, since she made so many sacrifices to that end when she was young. The answer? "No, not at all ... Even though I'm a banker, which is a different field, I gained so many new experiences from ballet. There are so many attributes that came from ballet that help me and have enabled me to be successful in my job."

And the spirit of dance lives on in Holliday's life: she is the proud mother of a daughter -- Sofia -- who, at 15 months, has decided she wants to be a ballerina for Halloween. "I need to get her into dance or something, quick," she laughs.

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Read about the other alums in this special SPOTLIGHT series!

SPOTLIGHT on: Sherry Hopkins (C'99)

SPOTLIGHT on: Victoria Ries (C'00)

SPOTLIGHT on: Nicole Jenkins (C'00)

SPOTLIGHT on: Emily Wakeling (C'00)