Skater Stories: Jaime Wong
Now in her third season with Disney On Ice's Magic In The Stars, Jaime shares her emotional journey to representing Moana and Raya and inspiring the next generation.
We’re sticking with “Magic in the Stars” for this week’s installment of Skater Stories, which is ironic because it’s a show that I cannot see this season, at least not without taking a very long trip. The show is on break right now but will resume its tour in the Philippines on Dec. 20 — which is when Jaime Wong will return to the ice. During her break, she took the time to talk with me about her skating career, getting to portray some inspiring characters, and her deeply moving in-show programs from last season.
Q: How did you get started in figure skating?
A: Well, I’m Canadian, so skating is just part of life here. When I was about five, even younger, four, my parents put me into the Learn to Skate leisure guide city program. And I really enjoyed it. It just wasn’t enough skating, I guess. I wanted to do more. So my parents put me into Skate Winnipeg, which is a local figure skating club here, and they put on a Learn to Skate, or CanSkate, program. I got through that pretty quickly and near the end of those stages and levels, it was figure skating or that was kind of like the end of that Learn to Skate program, and I really enjoyed it. One of the coaches pushed me into figure skating. And honestly, I never looked back. I just loved doing it so much, and I had done swimming, I had done gymnastics. I had done dance, and just nothing stuck the way skating had.
Q: Were there any skaters that you admired growing up or wanted to mimic their style?
A: Not until I was a figure skater myself. I didn’t watch figure skating as a kid before I did it. My parents don’t even know how to skate. Once I did get into skating, Joannie Rochette was one of my favorite skaters. She was a Canadian champion. But also just local. I was really lucky to have some really good mentors, some older skaters who were competitive skaters around our rink, and they really, really motivated me. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to make the senior free skate session. I wanted to pass, we had to pass certain free skating levels and skills levels before you could sign up for our senior free skate session. So, a lot of the skaters around me, I was very lucky to grow up around talented and humble and just nice people.
Q: You ended up going into the competitive track up there. What did you like and dislike about being a competitive skater?
A: When I first got into competitive skating, I loved it. I always told my parents, “oh my gosh, I get the ice to myself.” And I just loved skating. There’s something so liberating about it. And as I got older, to be honest, I had dreams. I’m like, oh, I wanted to be on TV, at the Olympics, at worlds. But once you reach a certain age, if you aren’t at that caliber, you kind of know where your path is going. So near the end of high school I did retire from competitive skating at that point. But I’ve always loved competing. I loved the excitement of a new season, creating new routines. The grind of training these programs until they feel like muscle memory. I’ve always loved that hard work that goes into creating that two to four minute performance on the ice.
Q: After you decided to retire from competitive skating, what made you decide to pursue a career with Disney On Ice?
A: So I actually didn’t jump right into Disney. After my competitive career, I actually went to school. I had a couple friends who were in Disney On Ice, but I really didn’t know if it was me. I didn’t know if I would be good at this type of skating. So I went to school, did a degree in commerce. And I also competed in track and field at my university. And then it wasn’t until I was finishing my degree and I was like, “so I’ve been an athlete my whole life, and I am not ready to sit in a cubicle.” I ran to an old friend who did Disney On Ice, and she was like, “Jamie, if you don’t know what you want to do yet, try this. You get to travel.” I’d been skating, I kind of picked up skating again. And we’d been seeing each other at the rink a lot, and she’s like, “just try it. Send an audition tape, see what happens. But if you’re not ready to sit down, you already finished school, like try this. You get to go travel the world. And then when you’re ready to settle down, when you’re ready to start working again, then you can always come back to this.” And that’s kind of how that took off. I just created an audition video. I learned the “How Far I’ll Go” solo. And I basically presented it in my audition video, and then I got into Disney On Ice from there.
Q: Do you remember how it felt after you auditioned when you got the call that they said, yes, we want you?
A: Yeah, I was so excited. At this time, I had just finished my bachelor’s degree, and I treated myself to a solo backpacking trip in Europe. And this was the first time I’d traveled alone, traveling for not sport-related reasons. I traveled so much for competitions for track, for figure skating, for rowing. But I’d never just traveled like this before, and it was kind of a treat to myself before potentially starting a full time job with three weeks of vacation per year. I just finished a trip and I had the best time ever by myself around 11 countries in Europe. And I just found how much I love traveling. So as soon as I got this job, I still remember. I was on one of my last countries in Europe, on a platform, on a train platform, and I got this email from, um, Judy Thomas at the time. She was the casting director. And I’d gotten the offer, and I was just so happy because I found just so recently this new love of traveling. So what a perfect mix to get to travel and skate as a job.
Q: I love that you’re able to combine those two loves of travel and skating. And speaking of travel, obviously, you go to a new city pretty much every week while this season is going on. So what does a typical day look like for you when you get to a new city?
A: Every day is so different in our world. Every city just offers different things. Sometimes we’re kind of in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes we’re in this big grand city. It really depends, but I definitely love to get the most out of every place I visit. I barely am just sitting around not doing anything. I love going out, seeing nature, parks. I love being active. Sometimes it’s just checking out different neighborhoods and just the different cultures and foods, and talking to locals. Every city’s so different, so it’s hard to answer that question with a single answer, but I love getting the most out of every place that I visit.
Q: You’re with Magic in the Stars, which is in it’s third season. This might be hard to answer, too, but what is your favorite part about being a part of that show?
A: Two things. So I do understudy Moana and Raya, and honestly, those are so special to me and why I have loved being on the show. This is my fifth year with Disney on Ice, and this is the only show that I’ve done more than one year with. But what I do love about this is, first of all, the Moana segment is so beautiful. I remember when we watched, I was at the build and I watched Marie Hanford do this and the choreography, the integration of props, the storytelling, the screen, just the whole story, I think is so well done, and really shares Moana’s story, just her journey through it. It’s a short segment, compared to maybe other shows, but I think it is so beautifully done.
And then, personally, for me, I also get to understudy Raya, which is one of our acro elements, and, to be honest, doing that has shocked me. When I was asked to go to this show and they told me they wanted me to do this. I was like, there’s absolutely no way. You think I’m gonna be able to fly in the air like that? But I was proven wrong, and I had some great coaches and great teammates on this cast, and we push each other, and we support each other, and it’s been such a cool experience, because it’s just something I didn’t even know that I wanted to do, and didn’t know that I could do, but my body was capable of something like that.
Q: I’ve been in the crowd when Raya takes flight. What is it like when you, as a skater, hear the crowd reaction to that?
A: It is so cool. I think, for me personally, I am a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. I love the thrill of doing fun, new little scary things. Like, I love downhill skiing. I love all those things. When we first take off, I think it is just the coolest feeling because I think about how much work me and my teammates have put into this Acropole act. That reward of being like, we put in so much work and people appreciate the art that we’re now putting out there. It makes it all worth it. Even when I see our lead Raya, Sydney Berrier, when she does it, she is incredible. The way she moves is so smooth, and she does it with such an ease. And I love even standing backstage and just hearing the crowd scream for her, because I know how hard this is. And it really helps carry us through the segment. I’m not gonna lie.
Q: You got to perform in your hometown of Winnipeg, so what was that experience like?
A: Amazing. To be able to be in the venue where the Winnipeg Jets play, where I’ve gone so many times to watch concerts growing up. Winnipeg is a big city, but small town feel. So everyone knows about the Canada Life Centre. We go there all the time for so many different events. It hosts so many events, so to be able to stand there. I still have this photo on my phone, where I’m standing on the ice, looking downstage at just an empty stadium, but just thinking about how when I watch Jets games, this is packed, when there’s the White Out parties, and we’re in the playoffs, just how insane this building gets. And now I get to stand at that center stage. and perform for people who come to watch me, it’s crazy to be on both sides and see both sides of live entertainment.
Q: Did you ever imagine when you were a kid watching Jets games up there that someday you would be, obviously it’s not the same ice exactly, but you would be on the ice performing there?
A: Not at all. I used to think how cool it would be to compete on ice like that. Like as a competitive skater, again, in Winnipeg, we don’t necessarily have the facilities that other big cities or other bigger skating clubs have access to. So they get to skate in beautiful venues and they get to skate on nice figure skating ice or venues. When I used to go to Calgary and train summers, that’s the only time I got to touch ice like that and be in a building that was for figure skating, where you have trainers and dancers and ballet teachers and choreographers all in the same building working with you. I never had that growing up in my hometown. So when I see big venues like this, I always dreamed about what it would be like to perform or skate, compete on, on an ice surface like that with that kind of crowd and just the atmosphere, the environment of the building. I love sports. I love that energy. So I can’t believe I’m on this side now. It’s really quite crazy.
Q: Earlier this year, you posted a video of your in-show program from last season. I thought that the caption was really touching, and the whole program was as well. And I was just curious, what did putting together that program mean for you?
A: First of all, thank you so much. That means a lot because that was such a vulnerable piece. I think it doesn’t matter who you are, life is hard. And we all have our ways of dealing with it, and we all go through different things, and we can never really know what people are going through. And I think, for me to put something out there like that, and a place where I have, over time, healed from my past experiences, what I’ve gone through in my life, from a healed position, I really wanted to create a piece that kind of honored that moment in my life. Not to sit in the sadness, but to almost celebrate that I went through that, and I got through that, and look at me now, and that I am now so healed that I can look back on that time, and it’s almost like a hug to my younger self. And I’m so lucky that my castmate and friend, Mimi [Chaffin], was so willing to participate with me. I think when you’re on the road with these cast members, we get so close that we become friends and family for life. We talk about so many things. So for us to be able to share those conversations and then put that out on the ice. It was so special to the both of us. I don’t even know if I have the words to describe how freeing and liberating that felt, to be able to perform that piece.
Q: Oh, that’s incredible. You also put together, for in-shows, a group number set to “Beyond” from Moana 2. That song is now an official part of Disney On Ice in the new show Jump In. I’m curious if you would ever see choreography for Disney On Ice in your future?
A: I would be so open to that. I would love to. I think that would be such a progression as the next step for my skating career. I really loved it, and thank you for bringing that up, because this was a really special piece too. Like I said, Moana is such a special segment to me on our show, and we have such a great team, the group of us who do Moana. And part of our Disney On Ice product that we bring to cities, there’s a VIP pre-show. It’s called a character experience. They travel with us and there is a pre-show before our ice show. And one of the performers there, she is an excellent singer. And if you notice in that in-show, it was actually her voice who was singing the song. She asked me one day, she’s like, “Jaime, I love this song.”
When Moana 2 came out, we were playing the song over and over again. We all loved this song. They gave me the idea, what if I sang this, and you skated to it? And to be honest, to this day, I have not done a solo in-show, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that or was ready for that. But I loved the idea of it, and I thought about it, and I was like, the six or seven of us Moanas here are such a good group. We are so supportive of one another. I was like, the whole point of this story in Moana 2 was she’s going off to find other villagers, other leaders, and in some ways, I kind of saw that in us. When you watch, you’ve seen so many Disney On Ice shows and you see, we’re all telling the same story, but we bring our own interpretation to it. We bring our own style of skating to it in some ways. And I thought, what a cool opportunity to bring us all together, and pull bits and pieces. I pulled steps from old Moana segments I did. I pulled steps from, when I watched each of their versions of one, I took little bits of their stuff, and I created this number, so it was kind of a mix of, all the old, the new, the, all the Moanas I have seen. And it’s such a special piece because we shared such a close bond for this character that we all love so much.
Q: Moana is a character that has only been around for 10 years, but has become such a huge part of Disney On Ice. So what does it mean to you to be a part of that and bring her story to audiences?
A: I am so honored every time I get to skate and be Moana out there for all those kids. What I love her story is that she starts off, not necessarily super confident in herself, and her story is about self discovery, self love, self confidence, and I love sharing that story and being that, I don’t want [to say] a role model because I personally am not Moana, but to be able to share that story and represent that for all the little kids out there, girls, boys, everything, like anyone. I love that I get to tell that story arc, because it’s so specific to her. And then I also love that it’s about the ocean and it’s appreciating nature because, on top of that, just who I am, I do love nature, and I think that the environment is so important. I do love that I’m also showing that out there and using my love for nature and Mother Nature and being able to share that as a performer out there.
Q: You mentioned the phrase role model, and I thought that was interesting because I’ve talked to competitive skaters, younger ones, who have said that the reason that they got into skating was because they went to a Disney On Ice show when they were a kid and decided they wanted to do that. So what does it mean to you to be part of something that is inspiring the next generation of skaters?
A: I feel so lucky to be able to do that, because I think skating has taught me so much. And not just skating, sports in general. Sports teaches you so much, teaches you so many life skills. It teaches you character. It builds your personality. And I think that sports are so important for the development of children. I’m also a teacher. So, again, I’m very passionate about this. So to be able to be a reason why a kid watches a show and wants to get into skating, that’s such an honor, and that’s why I do it. What I do love about skating in comparison to other sports, is that there’s that storytelling. Like I said, the reason why I choreograph, it’s this liberating feeling. It’s another outlet for us to express feelings. And again, in this day and age, finding spaces where we can be free and be safe to be ourselves and tell our stories is so important. So if I have inspired a kid, that is amazing to hear.
Q: Now, I know between performing and practicing and rehearsing and open ice, skating takes up so much of your time, but what do you like to do when you are not skating?
A: On the road, I absolutely love sightseeing, traveling, taking in cultures, meeting people, um, because when do I ever get that chance in a real life situation? At home, I love to participate in different areas. So I coach track and field. I coach skating. I also have my bachelor’s of education. So I do try to sub, or right now I’m teaching classes while I’m home on break. I just love to work with our youth and give back to my community in that way.
Q: Want to do a quick little lightning round here if you’re up for it. Favorite move to perform on the ice?
A: Probably double toe.
Q: Favorite city you’ve ever gotten to visit with Disney On Ice?
A: Boston was very cool, but I will say that answer might change now that I have the rest of Asia to go to.
Q: Favorite Disney song of all time?
A: Ooh, “Reflection.”
Q: Favorite Disney movie of all time?
A: Lion King, when I was a kid, but now, probably Moana.
Q: Favorite figure skating movie of all time?
A: Was it called Ice Princess? With the jumping shrimp? You know how when you’re a figure skater and you know that terminology isn’t real? Like, we loved to hate-watch this movie with all my figure skating friends growing up. But probably Ice Princess, honestly.
Q: There are 6 main kinds of jumps in figure skating. Loop, toe loop, flip, Salchow, Lutz, and Axel. Which one is your most hated?
A: Axel.
Q: And last but not least, one piece of advice you would give to anyone starting out in skating?
A: I would say just try your best and keep going. Skating is a sport where you will fall more times than you land, especially when you are learning new things. So if you can push through, you are building your own perseverance and that is building character. When you get those new tricks, it is such a cool feeling, whether that’s a spin, whether that’s a field move, whether that’s a jump. Skating is something where you just have to keep trying and on the other side of that, you can build this repertoire of amazing tricks that you can put together. I think that’s so incredible. And, figure skaters are very strong. Strong people, strong people, to get through this sport, it takes a lot. It takes a lot of guts.