Jaleesa Vincent really wanted to be a dancer. After practicing for hours each week, the gifted, Sunshine Coast teen had tapped and twirled her way to a gig at Disneyland.
However, when the Disney trip clashed with the Australian Titles, Jaleesa ultimately ditched the dance routine for a saltwater act. Although convinced she’d made the right call, the decision was still painful. “It was like this huge thing, like crying, ‘Oh my God, I’ve given up on my dream’.”
Jaleesa got pretty good at making it through heats and hauling on wet contest jerseys, but eventually became disenchanted with rigid judging criteria and cut-throat scenarios that turn surfing pals into ruthless snakes. “I didn’t really have a competitive bone in me,” she admits, whilst talking to Tracks in a video-recorded interview. “Really, like, if my friends were paddling for a wave, like, so desperately. I was like, ‘you go, like, go get it’. So that clearly, like, wasn’t my calling.”
Despite tossing away the comp singlet in her teens, Jaleesa still wanted to be a professional surfer – just without the wind-muffled heat sirens, the ugly scaffolding and the scoring systems. Big brother, Jake, was a major influence. Three years her senior, Jake seemed to have found his groove, mixing surfing with various other creative pursuits. “I kind of just followed him into surfing,” explains Jaleesa. “He’s really arty, and has a style of living that he’s adapted a lot.”
Without the pressure to compete, Jaleesa was free to explore other muses. She still got a buzz from knifing a rail and kissing the lip but embracing her renaissance tendencies felt necessary. “When I quit doing competitions, I feel like that was a big milestone, I guess because then I just started surfing completely for fun, and not trying to surf like everyone else. And then I put more time into like art… I just completely became myself, that self that I needed to be… Art and music is just as important to me as surfing, and so I need to do all of that to feel whole.”
Jaleesa soon fell in with the ‘Rage Crew’, a collective of surfing beatniks that includes Toby Cregan, Creed McTaggart, Noa Deane, Beau Foster, Ellis Ericson and Shaun Manners. Their brief, according to Toby Cregan in a Surfing World article from several years ago, was pretty simple. “We started Rage so we could do creative stuff and not have to answer to anyone, so we can have an excuse to make vids and design stuff.” Jaleesa fit right in and soon became a regular collaborator in their surf clips and various projects.
Eventually Billabong saw value in tossing a little cash at a female freesurfer with a curious suite of talents. With sponsor dollars in her pocket, Jaleesa quit her gig as a Sunshine Coast lifeguard and hot-tailed it to Byron in search of fertile creative ground and like-minded company. Pretty soon she’d added another string to her bow when her and new housemate, Ellis Ericson, started their own brand, Pussy Surfboards. While Ellis has been sculpting foam for the last decade, Jaleesa concedes she hadn’t thought too deeply about design in the past. “Before I moved into the house with Ellis, I’d never, like, even considered what a concave was. So that’s been a big change in my surfing lately, not necessarily like ripping more or anything, but just like appreciating, like feeling it, like a whole experience of surfing, from getting the blank to shaping it, to getting to spray it to glassing it.”
In much the same way Jaleesa overlaps disparate interests out of the water, her surfing is an alchemy of various styles. If you were borrowing a dance label, you might call it jazz ballet, blending classical lines with more progressive choreography. “She can ride a barrel, do airs and just do the best grab rails,” enthused photographer Simon Williams shortly after a trip to the Maldives with Jaleesa… “She’s great to work with and fun to be around and she really is like a female version of Ozzie Wright.” Meanwhile, Rage Crew buddy, Creed McTaggart, insists Jaleesa’s mix of creative drive and full-throttle-charging brings an infectious energy to the lineup. “Jaleesa is one of my favourite people to surf with! She’s always going huge and pushing her surfing.”
Creed was also a collaborator on Jaleesa’s radical initiative to make a surfing musical. Written, produced and directed with her partner Luka, ‘Ju Ju’ the surf musical took seven months to make. In what may be an entirely new genre of film, the song, surf and dance platform enabled Jaleesa to combine many of her talents – writing, singing, dancing, art, animation and surfing – in a single, grand-scale production. Jaleesa plays Ju Ju, a disillusioned receptionist looking for answers. In what might be described as a warped, surf-themed fantasy, Creed McTaggart chimes in as Creed of the Dark, while the nimble-footed Josie Prendergast is cast as The Queen of the Light. In the Tracks office we use to joke that someone might write an ‘Occy the musical’ one day. It never happened but Jaleesa did give him a part in Ju Ju, where Occy plays a mean boss who threatens to fire her.
According to Creed, Jaleesa and Luka went all Rogers and Hammerstein on ‘Ju Ju’, taking an incredibly professional approach to all aspects of the film. “They had it all planned out with shot lists and knew exactly what they wanted…It’s really cool being around their creative energy, always super positive and keen to make things happen. Ambitious but in a way where you can tell that they are really enjoying the journey as well.”
While your average, sponsored surfer is certainly not writing and choreographing musicals, Jaleesa has an even quirkier hobby – skeletal articulation. Think of the dinosaur exhibits at the museum, only on a smaller scale. So far, her major reassembly project involved putting a bat skeleton back together, but she insists there is a bag of bones on the balcony that beckon like an unfinished puzzle. “I’m pretty sure there’s like three dead owls on the deck.”
Writing songs is another muse for the surfer/artist who has appeared in several bands. “If I write a song in the day, I just have so much fun… I’m so lucky that I have the time to do that, to not have the pressure of having to get up early for work and stuff.”
Although she fronts Broadway-punk outfit ‘Cupid and the Stupids’ (also known as C.A.T.S) it can be challenging to herd said cats, so Jaleesa has been working on her own material. “Hopefully I’ll record an album one day,” she enthuses before, dialling down the pressure to get it done, “but I don’t know how soon that will be.”
Turning her attention to things with fins, Jaleesa insists she’d love to see more people riding Pussy surfboards. Making good use of the leftover surf footage from the musical, she’s planning to release a film that celebrates the craft her and Ellis make together. Meanwhile, Jaleesa and partner Luka are working on another genre-twisting film called ‘Snakes and Surf Breaks’, a theme she continues to follow. “We went to Indo earlier this year and found heaps of snakes. Hopefully we can turn that into a series where we go to different places and look for snakes and waves.”
With her interests so splintered, one can’t help but wonder how Jaleesa figures out what to do with her day, but it seems she is comfortable trusting in the mood when she wakes up. “I guess it just depends on what I feel like… it’s fun having so many different things to do. So you don’t get bored, I guess. Like, if the surf’s bad, then yeah, maybe I’ll make some music or do some painting, and then, like, with poetry and writing and stuff that just comes randomly whenever I just feel inspired, like, I won’t write for like months, and then I’ll just, like, write all day for like a week. It just comes out of the blue, I guess.”
The recent Maldives jaunt was a welcome departure from the regular Indo pilgrimage and Jaleesa suggests she is determined to seek out locations that challenge her surfing and stimulate self-expression. “I always feel inspired after a trip, because you have so much fun on the trip, but then you’re excited to get home and get back to, like, all my little hobbies.”
However, if travel is the fuel for creativity, constructing the right home environment is her key to making things happen. “I think when I’m home is like when I get the most inspired… because I have all my stuff here… I kind of leave everything out, so that I can chip away at this painting, and then I go have my drawing or writing book on the table, and I’ll just chip away at that.”
As Jaleesa continues to juggle surfing with painting, poetry, music, dance and film projects, brother Jake is still her most trusted critic; the person she taps to deliver the hard truths. “If I have an idea, I always, like, run it through him first. Or, like, just before finishing a project, I’ll get him to watch it first. And he can be brutally honest, I guess.”
Meanwhile, her little slice of north coast Arcadia makes it possible to fit everything in. “There’s those days where you get to have, like a surf, and then I maybe go swim at a waterfall and be submerged in nature, and then in the afternoon maybe do some painting, and then have a jam, and, like, have a yummy feast, or a barbecue with friends.”
Jaleesa Vincent has contrived a way to live her best version of a surfing life, but when pressed for tips on how others might be inspired to follow their own creative journeys, she is reluctant to fling back cheese-ball stereotypes. Instead, she deflects the request by explaining that she watched Kung Fu Panda IV on a plane ride home. “He was trying to come up with inspirational quotes but just couldn’t do it.” However, eventually Jaleesa spills out a few pearls of wisdom. “Follow your freak… and don’t compare yourself to others… Make sure you always have time to have fun and push yourself and go hard as well… and if you’re scared of something then do it… With my first band I was a drummer, and I used to be so nervous before a gig, and then I’d say, ‘You can do this’ and I’d be buzzing after the gig, like ‘Holy shit I did it’.”
In a world that increasingly calls upon us to be single-dimensional specialists, reduced to monotonous routines to make rent and mortgage payments, Jaleesa Vincent is bucking the trend. Reminding us all that there is virtue in exploring multiple mediums of self-expression and that life can become a kind of spirited, impromptu dance instead of a banal, daily grind if we can tune into the music of our souls.
