Name: Wicked's ‘Dancing Through Life’ Full Scene Breakdown: Choreography, VFX & More (ft. Jonathan Bailey)
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T15:45:08.000Z
Duration: 12 min 33 s
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My name is Johnny Bailey and I play Fierro in Wicked.

We're here together to break down one of the scenes in the film.

So this scene is where Fiero is loosening up this school.

It was this idea of spinning into it and landing and crashing into a new headspace.

And it went all the way up to the roof in the center, which is 45ft high.

I think when we were shooting this, about 350 people were on set.

We knew if this worked, if Dancing Through Life works, that we had our movie.

So I was like, let's call it a tornado wheel from now on.

Sorry, John hates it being called the hamster wheel.

Three different bookshelves would be rotating with these ladders.

How do we move a camera through this tornado wheel safely?

The amount of engineering and people that had to go into securing this.

I mean, insurance alone really didn't want us to do this.

I wasn't sure they were going to allow Jonathan Bailey in the tornado wheel because of safety, which makes sense because this is, you know, he needs to carry on.

I remember getting the dailies for the scene and thinking, how is no one getting crushed while they're dancing through it?

Because there's about four or five people that are behind that are looking at a bunch of monitors in there and they're changing the speed so that the dancers don't get crashed.

And you have to have dancers who can move that thing.

You have to have engineers who can run that thing.

And you don't know what kind of dancers you can do until you have the thing built.

And this thing wasn't built till two weeks before shooting.

We very early on started placing cameras in the wheel, seeing where we could attach cameras to and Then I worked with our key grip, the camera operator, to figure out how do we get our massively huge crane in here and make it feel like you're moving through all three of the ladders, but

you physically can't and keep it centered.

Those ladders were headaches because they are stationary on that, even though they're turning, and

But, Johnny, the dancers, Chris, what you guys did was ignored all the technical parts of it and made it feel like butter.

They did build us a little miniature model that worked.

It ran, and so I could, like, kind of, like run it and, like, think about the things.

But ultimately it was like, you gotta get in there and play.

You know, you can think about a million things, but

until you get inside of that space, there's really nothing you can do.

We had these extraordinary dancers, Chris, gathered from far and wide.

We ended up with some martial artists, some parkour performers, some circus performers.

Really, parkour was probably the most valuable skill set to put into a contraption like this.

Because it's timed and everything's moving.

People need to react fast, and that's what parkour does really well.

They could keep up with the speed of this contraption.

he jumps and he slides down the thing at the time we rotate the camera.

That was another thing I found very early on in the rehearsal process.

I played with this with the contrasting the camera with the ladders going a certain way and the books going a certain way.

It's like an easy illusion to pull off because of the nature of the circle Life is fraudless when you're thoughtless those who don't try Never look foolish Dancing through life Some of those shots that you're looking at, these people are upside down, and

Well, it's between the design of the rotating drum and the camera moving the opposite way.

It would take about 25, 30 seconds to get then strapped in.

And then you'd wait for, you know, the blood to.

Then you black out for a second, maybe really him, by the way, going all the way upside down.

And I just remember, like, how it looked when their legs just start to float.

And you're like, oh, this is a whole moment in this number.

It's one of my favorite moments of the whole thing.

It's amazing what hair products can do, though.

It was very hard for us to keep it in place because they were upside down most of the time, and

we had to keep resetting because it's extraordinarily complicated from our point of view, it was keeping them perfect even though they'd been upside down for 20 times at this stage.

Jonathan certainly has product, but one wants to keep him a little more natural and let it move.

Whereas our dancers, we concentrated on keeping it as solid as we could so we didn't have to keep going.

In 2000, cans of hairspray went mainly on the background.

If he's singing about being carefree, you know, let go and just live life.

It's like, well, what does that look like inside of this tornado wheel from his perspective?

How does that translate through his body when he drops down and he lifts up and that thing picks him up?

It's like I remember just finding that moment.

You know, this feels carefree when you're dancing through the.

So I chose blue as his signifying color palette.

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Wicked's ‘Dancing Through Life’ Full Scene Breakdown: Choreography, VFX & More (ft. Jonathan Bailey)

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