Denise Parungao on Her Journey From Manila to New Jersey Ballet and “Étoile”

“The stars aligned,” she says, when she traveled to the U.S. for a Nutcracker guesting on the East Coast. During that time she decided to try her luck auditioning for New Jersey Ballet, drawn to artistic director Maria Kowroski’s leadership. “She’s been around the greatest, so I was sure she’d bring in great repertoire and people,” Parungao says. Kowroski, who had been a star of New York City Ballet, offered her a contract, and in spring of 2022 she joined NJ Ballet, which has a vastly different repertoire than Parungao’s former company. “I left Ballet Philippines as a principal, so I knew coming to the U.S. that I would have to restart, but that’s why [I moved]: to do something new and different.” 

Homegrown Talent

Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Parungao began dancing at age 8. “Every weekend, I would stay with my uncle and he would go to the gym,” she says. “There was no one to take care of me and my cousin, but the gym had a ballet studio, so my cousin and I started taking classes.” Parungao fell in love right away. “I didn’t play around,” she laughs. “I knew that I wanted this.”

She continued more serious ballet training with Dance Theatre Arts under Pamela Ortiz-Bondoc and Brezhnev Larlar. Dance Theatre Arts is a local school that completed exams through the Australian Conservatoire of Ballet under Christine Walsh. In 2010, Parungao received a scholarship from Ballet Philippines to pursue a Bachelor of Performing Arts in Dance degree that the company offered in partnership with De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde. She became an apprentice with BP in 2011, joining the main company in 2012. Parungao eventually rose to the rank of principal, performing lead roles in Swan Lake, Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Carmen, and The Nutcracker. 

While Parungao had toured outside of the country with BP, she had never performed with another company. She says her training in the Philippines was more Vaganova-based and that BP’s repertoire leaned more towards the classics, a contrast to her current work at NJ Ballet. Since joining, Parungao has performed featured roles in George Balanchine’s Who Cares? and Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain and This Bitter Earth, and Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs, and she was part of the original cast of Harrison Ball’s Purcell Suite.

She says adapting to the speed of Balanchine’s choreography has been her biggest challenge thus far. “It’s very fast and so different from what I know,” says Parungao. “But I’m very musical, so with practice and Maria’s guidance, I was prepared to do Balanchine’s works. Maria said, ‘Let the music take you.’ ”

Open to Opportunity

Aside from performing with NJ Ballet, Parungao has also had the exciting opportunity to be part of the New York cast of the Amazon Prime series “Étoile,” working alongside ballet stars like Benjamin Freemantle, Brooklyn Mack, Alex Wong, and WanTing Zhao. She says building new relationships with the dancers on set was her favorite memory from the experience. “NJ Ballet was my only circle, but now I have friends outside of the company, and that feels great,” says Parungao. 

While Parungao misses her friends and colleagues back in the Philippines, she tries to visit her family in California often, since her mother and brother have also relocated. In the future, she’d like to take everything she’s learned here and return to the Philippines to teach and perform. But in the meantime, she’s enjoying her new life in the U.S. Parungao says she’d also like to take more advantage of the arts and culture scene in nearby Manhattan, possibly taking acting classes and being involved in performance projects during NJ Ballet’s summer layoff. “I want to keep learning,” she says. “I don’t have everything planned, but I’m open and I want to be an artist.”