Feb 14, 2020
Emily Pihlaja received her early dance training from the New England Academy of Dance. Yet, at the age of 12 she committed to dance as her vocation when she left home in Connecticut to attend the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington, D.C. where she graduated in 2009. She then moved to Portland where she performed for four seasons with the Oregon Ballet Theatre. Emily was featured in ballets such as George Balanchine’s Serenade, Divertimento No. 15, Emeralds, The Four Temperaments, Swan Lake, Coppelia, Giselle, and The Nutcracker. She also performed in New York with Thomas/Ortiz Dance. Her performances with Spectrum Dance Theater include 5th Avenue Theatre’s Carousel and Donald Byrd’s Carmina Burana and more.
Listen closely for Emily’s unique take on these themes:
- The moment when dancing became more than a hobby through a series of choices that set her apart
- Her career journey from being a little girl who performed for fun to signing a contract as an adult with a dance company
- The art of performing before you are ready and how to go on anyways even when you don’t have time to practice very much at all…
- What it feels like to perform on stage especially as a lucid adult who knows that you are being watched and held up to a certain set of expectations and her handling of freaking out or fight or flight
- How a dancer uses resilience to come out of a mortifying experience and finishes the show and has the courage to do it again the next day
- How to envision success or go for it even when you don’t have a winning example or a sense of what success should look like
- How to accept constructive feedback even when you have a strong sense of identity as an adult and years of being a professional at what you do
Listen to how Emily would answer this job interview question that advertising professionals and marketers in small and large companies are asked all the time:
Tell me about a time when you were self-aware enough not to go for the lead role on a performance and that was the best decision you could have made in the interest of the overall performance. Curious, how do you think about self-awareness?