Photo: Guess

If it’s difficult to imagine Rihanna taking orders from a drill sergeant, just ask her friend, the R&B singer Shontelle. ELLE spoke with Shontelle Thursday night at a cocktail party in the flagship Soho store of GUESS by Marciano, which benefited the Joffrey Ballet School.

“I was actually Rihanna’s drill sergeant,” said Shontelle. “It was fun; we were both in Cadets Corp together in Barbados. I’ve actually made her ‘drop and give me ten’! Cadets is almost like R.O.T.C. but it’s voluntary and for both males and females. Can you imagine Rihanna dressed in camouflage fatigues and boots?”

Shontelle, who was dressed not in camouflage but in a leopard GUESS dress, recorded her platinum single, “Impossible,” (which reached no.13 on Billboard’s Hot 100) on her second studio album, No Gravity, in 2010. Bruno Mars and No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, who produced No Gravity on the Universal Motown label, are currently working with Shontelle on her upcoming album, along with R&B artists Jackie Boyz and hip-hop production duo The Runners (who produced Rihanna’s “California King Bed”). “I’ve been writing songs since I was a little girl,” said Shontelle. “Friends of mine asked if I could write some songs for them, which is how I first got into it. I wrote a song for another local artist, back home in Barbados – she’s known as the queen of the calypso/soca music world – and the song blew up and got onto the club scene, worldwide. People started calling me: ‘we heard that you wrote this song; someone told us you can also sing.’ So I ended up doing all these auditions and showcases; then Motown asked me to stay with them.”

Shontelle, who lives in midtown Manhattan, told us about writing Rihanna’s “Man Down.” “When Rihanna was working on her new album, she called and said, ‘Dude, I’m working on this song. I’d like you to come and help me write it.’ She was on tour, at her show at the Nokia Theater on Jones Beach. She works really hard, so she literally got off the stage and went straight onto the studio bus and we did the song there. It’s her new single, so I’m excited.” Shontelle would probably appreciate The Joffrey School of Ballet’s program, described as “advanced ballet boot camp” on their website.

The hard-working ballet students performed brief divertissements at the event en pointe. “The Joffrey School of Ballet is a leader in dance education and training and GUESS by Marciano is proud to support such a wonderful organization,” said Paul Marciano, co-founder and CEO of GUESS? Inc. “The GUESS by Marciano woman is sophisticated and empowered and the Joffrey Ballet School is the type of establishment that she supports.”

ELLE spoke with two of the first-year ballet students, 16-year-old Chyrstyn Fentroy, from Seattle, and 20-year-old McCallah Moriarty, from Los Angeles, who both now live in Greenwich Village. “We’re pre-professional, so we’re training to audition for [ballet] companies and our next level is dancing in a full company. We take professional pointe, techniques classes, variations, and we have a student company that we participate in. We actually had a performance of new works two weeks ago,” said Fentroy. “There are three different tracks in our school: Joffrey contemporary, classical and contemporary ballet, which is our track, and resembles the original Joffrey company. We perform works by our directors and also bring in outside choreographers.” “It’s very competitive nowadays,” said Moriarty, “because there are so few companies to audition for and the opportunity could just pass you by. It’s hard but at our school, we all really get along, like close-knit family. We usually take classes from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then we have rehearsals from 5:00 until 8:00 p.m. We dance ten hours a day.”