A young Innisfil dancer will be starting her summer vacation with a trip to Portugal to represent her country on stage at the 2023 Dance World Cup.
Alexis McKenna has been dancing since she was four years old, when her parents say they realized she needed something to call her own after spending hours at the rink with her older brother.
“She’d been at the hockey arena since she was three days old and every year we’d ask if she wanted to play hockey and she would say no. I had a passion for dance so we thought we would put her in that and see how it went,” said mom Nicole.
Between her own classes and working as a teacher’s assistant, 14-year-old Alexis, who trains at Chelsea’s Dance Pac in Stroud, spends five days a week dancing — and that doesn’t even include the long weekends where she travels to Toronto to train for the big event with the team.
Although she enjoys all different styles of dance, and has trained in jazz, tap, hip-hop, and lyrical, Alexis says her favourite of all the styles is contemporary.
“Every dance tells a story, but I feel like with contemporary, you can put a deeper emotion into it. It just makes me happy when I do it,” she said.
In addition to the friends she’s made at the studio, Alexis says she simply loves being able to move and express herself in so many different ways.
“The movement makes me feel like I can explain stuff that I can’t really say," she said. "I feel like since dance has become my life it just brought out what I needed to say.”
A member of the studio’s competitive team, Alexis was selected by a panel of judges during a dance competition earlier this year to represent Canada at the event, which brings together thousands of dancers from around the world. The local teen will be part of the children’s division for her age group and will perform in three jazz numbers (trio, small group and large group) and three contemporary numbers (trio, small group and large group).
“I was surprised, shocked, but mostly excited,” Alexis said of the opportunity, adding she’s looking forward to not only travelling to Portugal for the first time, but also competing with the new friends she’s made on the team.
Her dance family, including Kim Langdon, the studio’s manager and owner of the studio along with her daughter Chelsea King, couldn’t be prouder of Alexis.
“Lexie came here almost eight years ago and she had something special. You could tell right off the bat," Langdon said. "As her training progressed, she just went leaps and bounds year to year, and the last two years she has just come out of her shell. She’s a different dancer altogether.
"She works hard, is a great team member … She is just an amazing part of our dance family and we are all very proud of her.”
