Last week, Brooklyn’s Alamo Draft House held a special screening of “Cocoon Central Dance Team’s” short film, Snowy Bing Bongs. The screening was preceded by live comedy performances from Ana Fabrega (The Chris Gethard Show) and Amy Zimmer (That Was Fantastic), as well as a short titled The Was by Soda Jerk & The Avalanches. Following Snowy Bing Bongs’s screening was a Q&A session with “Cocoon” member Tallie Medel and director Rachel Wolther. Below, we have some highlights from the panel.
Tell us about “Cocoon” and it’s origins.
Tallie Medel: Okay, “Cocoon Central Dance Team” is myself and my best friends Eleanore Pienta and Sunita. Eleanore is working on a film right now, and Sunita is working on Season 2 of Glow and has been nominated for a SAG ensemble award, and a SAG stunt ensemble award, I believe as well. It’s very cool, and it’s her birthday. As “Cocoon,” we first moved to New York in January of 2009 just for fun, but we’ve been doing comedy very ambitiously in college and knew that we wanted to pursue it in New York City, but “Cocoon” was the only means we had at the time. The only thing that made us happy was to make up dances in our apartment and our friends Nat Townsend and Bob Wallace, who’s now my fiancée, invited us to do a dance at their very first comedy variety show, The Moon, and then it was so successful at that first show, that they invited us to do a dance every time there was a show. So it became their house dance team and we were invited to other shows, and then eventually just branched out and developed “Cocoon Central Dance Team.” So that’s our history in a nutshell.
Can you talk about the editing process for the movie?
Rachel Wolther: Yea, most of the movie was heavily storyboarded, and when I did the first cut, I cut it to the storyboard. The exception is the big song and dance number at the end, which we were like “It’s just a music video, and we’re gonna bind it later, but both Alex and I are good editors, and funny, and we worked with a really talented music video editor who worked for Beyoncé, and we found some great jokes in there. A lot of the comedy was, like, we knew the choreography, and we studied it, thinking, “What is the funniest way to get every moment of this dance?”
So Tallie, you’ve done films before. Did it seem obvious to you that this would eventually be a film?
Tallie Medel: Not at all. Actually, they were so patient with us by convincing us that it was good to make into a movie. And uniting those worlds has since been the greatest joy. I love promoting movies that I’m in, when I like them, and so getting to do a Q&A with my best friends has always been this thing for all three of us, where we enter a new space, and each project is progressively better, and we’ll be intimidated in a room, and then whoever else in the cast or the crew, and is like “What else do you do?” We’ve all had the experience of being “Well, I have this dance comedy trio called “Cocoon Central Dance Team.” It’s really stupid, like really dumb. And all three of us have had the experience of showing them a video, and then everyone is like “Cuckoo!” So, it’s so fun, because it’s so dumb, and it’s been really cool to unite those worlds, where it’s like “This is my job. I have to go promote Snowy Bing Bongs across the north, circle, and back.” So, thank you, Rachel!
The film is now available on Topic.com.