HAPPILY EVER AFTER Dancing in an Alternate Timeline STORY BY MATTHEW ST. AMAND THERE IS A SPECIAL CHALLENGE for theatre performers to live up to the age-old belief—“The show must go on!”—when it is a near certainty that the show will be canceled. This was the dilemma that faced Windsor Dance eXperience (WDX) when the COVID-19 global pandemic began in March 2020, cutting a wide swath of cancellations throughout arts communities everywhere. WDX demonstrated, however, that its art director, choreographers and performers refused to give up. “Windsor Dance eXperience is not a dance school,” explains Tiffany Chan, owner and artistic director. “We rehearse to perform in front of audiences. Ordinarily, we do two or three shows a year at the Capitol Theatre, so doing a movie was not something that ever occurred to us because we’re all about performing live.” She continues: “Around the time the pandemic started, we were working on a Greek mythology show called ‘Thread and Stone.’ Because of the pandemic, that show never made it to stage. So, we decided to remount ‘Happily Ever After’, bigger and better as a movie in September 2020.” “Happily Ever After” was originally performed by WDX in 2012. The show is a creative interpretation of classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales presented as a series of dance extravaganzas. “The different stories are tied together by a narrative about a little girl who has lost touch with her imagination,” Tiffany says. When the little girl discovers a book of fairy tales, each story comes to life in her mind through different genres of music and styles of dance. “I was so naïve when the pandemic began,” Tiffany recalls. “I didn’t realize the scale of the situation. I said to my dancers ‘I’ll see you in six weeks!’ Then it rolled into months and months! We started doing rehearsals over Zoom when I heard from parents that kids were not as physically active during the lockdown and that it was affecting their mental health. I began online sessions just to keep them dancing, get them moving.” A major reason for the decision to turn “Happily Ever After” into a movie was to motivate WDX dancers and assure them their efforts would not end in cancellation. The decision for the film version also made sense because Tiffany’s husband, John Chan, happened to possess professional calibre video production skills and equipment. John co-owns the video production company Perfect Shutter. He has made promo videos for WDX in the past and his years of filming weddings and other events, made him the ideal cinematographer.
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Clockwise from top left: Corson Fraleigh as Prince Charming. Production still by John Chan; Tiffany and John Chan at Windsor Dance eXperience Studios; Jayden Mouawad as The Frog Prince, and Emily Egbonna as The Lonely Princess. Production still by John Chan; Cameron Clark as an Evil Step-Sister at film shoot. Photo by Misha Zagorac.