Emmy nominated co-choreographers Danielle Sten-Guillermo and Lance Guillermo had very little time to pull off the hallucination dance sequence on “Will Trent.”
They had less than four days prep time and less than a full day of shooting.
In the episode, titled “One of Us Now,” Ramon Rodriguez’s Will Trent has a fever dream where he hallucinates and finds himself dancing to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” and he confesses his love to Angie, played by Erika Christensen.
Showrunner Liz Heldens wanted that song. Lucky for all involved, the song was cleared. Once the Guillermos received the script, it was off to the races. But this was unlike anything they had ever done before. Danielle Sten-Guillermo says, “We were told, ‘You’ll probably have Ramon for maybe an hour in any of your rehearsal time.”
But that didn’t stop them from piecing the sequence together.
With script in hand, Lance Guillermo cast his dancers. “We had that done within two days,” says Danielle Sten-Guillermo.
During prep, they would grab the actors straight out of rehearsals to work on the sequence. Other times, they’d work with Rodriguez over Zoom.
With dance needing to tell a story, the hallucination device helped immensely because they didn’t need to consider how Will Trent would be moving as a character. Lance Guillermo says, “We had a lot of leeway to be trippy.”
Neither were worried about the costume designer knowing they were in good hands with the show’s department head, Mary-Jane Fort. The duo had previously worked with her on the Fox series “The Big Leap. Danielle Sten-Guillermo says, “Her vision is it’s so compatible with how you see movement and how you want to feel movement. She takes all of that into consideration.”
With limited access to Rodriguez, they would send clips of Lance Guillermo dancing. “That was so he could see which direction the scene was going in,” explains Danielle Sten-Guillermo.
Helping the co-choreographers was Rodriguez’s background as a basketball player, Lance Guillermo says, “He was already a great mover, and then he has a salsa background.”
The actor was a natural who picked up the steps with ease. Says Danielle Sten-Guillermo, “He was able to watch Lance, and he was able to manipulate that into his body. His self-awareness was phenomenal.”
Lance Guillermo says, “We were tapping into all those things. But I think the biggest thing was that he was so willing and trusting in us.”
