The Sunday Times, Culture
By Clifford Bishop
Sadler’s Wells as a skating rink? Yes – but the biggest surprise about Sleeping Beauty on Ice is that’s its serious choreography.
Ice skating may not have much in common with the gladiatorial Roman games – there is an even more dubious dress sense, for starters, while the judging is harsher and a little more corrupt – but at the very least, you expect to find them both in an arena setting. Whether tentative, padded amateurs toppling each other like slippery dominoes each winter at London’s Somerset House, or astonishingly under-insulated pros turning themselves into human orreries as they swoop around Olympic rinks, skaters are people who perform at or below eye level, and in the round. Not to mention in a spirit of such unabashed, rabble-rousing, tricks-and-tinsel populism that they make Strictly Some Dancing look like the Ballets Russes.
The association is so strong that, when someone told me a show called Sleeping Beauty on Ice was coming to Sadler’s Wells, perhaps the UK’s foremost dance venue, I automatically corrected him: “You mean the Albert Hall.” In fact, this Sleeping Beauty will tour a string of “legitimate” theatres across Britain, starting in Cardiff this month, and while snobs and aesthetes may turn up their noses at the idea of such vulgar entertainment passing itself off as art, everyone involved is deadly serious about their right and fitness to be on a proper stage.
The show’s director, Tony Mercer, is quietly disgusted that “each musical, for instance, gets judged on its own merits, but all ice shows get lumped together as if they were all the same thing”.
Mercer began his theatrical career as a lighting designer, and first started working with skaters in 1993, in a company called Wild Rose Ice Theatre. “At the time, it seemed like a totally unique idea to put ice skaters on stage,” he says, “but they were still just getting medal-winners from the championships, putting them in costumes and having them go through their competition elements. They thought that was enough. So I kept butting in with more ideas to create a proper story, until eventually they asked me if I wanted to direct.” Since then, both at Wild Rose and with his current outfit, The Imperial Ice Stars, Mercer has tried to minimise the stars-doing-turns aspect of the ice show.
True, the company’s most beribboned skater, pairs world champion and Olympic medallist Mandy Woetzel, gets to play the Beauty, Princess Aurora. But even the multiple Russian Ice-dance champion Olga Sharuotenko, now the lilac fairy, had to spend time in the corps until she learnt how to act. And the role of Catalabutte – much bigger here than in the ballet, and boasting the most virtuosic solo skating – belongs to Anton Kyklov, who retired from competition because he was sick of never getting selected to represent his country. “There is so much depth in Russian skating,” Mercer says. “Under any other flag, Anton would be at the Olympics and fighting for a medal; but the point is, we don’t sell the show on the strength of medals, Mandy’s or anyone else’s. We sell it in its strength as a show.”
Like any theatrical director, Mercer concentrates on plot, mood and character. The technical elements are the last things to go in, devised in collaboration with the dancers and the choreographer, Tatiana Tarasova. (If the Sleeping Beauty on Ice were being sold on medal hauls, Tarasova would be the ultimate draw, having coached, among others, Bestemianova and Bukin, Klimova and Ponomarenko and Rodnina and Zaitsev to Olympic gold.)
The results can be surprising. Carabosse is performed by the beautiful and wonderfully game Maria Borovikova as a kind of crazed goth-metal groupie, prone to getting tossed around by her own evil entourage like an Ann Summers basque’n’tights combo at a particularly competitive jumble sale. One of the most striking scenes has Sharutenko’s Lilac Fairy passed between four men in a continuous series of 28 lifts, unable to touch the ice because she is not wearing her skates. Just as the audience begins to appreciate the beautiful rigour of this little coup, she does alight – and not only that, balances on pointe. “It was a little sadistic to ask her,” Mercer confesses, “because it’s nightmarishly difficult, especially if the ice gets wet. But Olga tole me that, when she was a child, she was torn between skating or ballet, so I thought I’d give her a chance…She was very nervous when I asked, but within a week she was doing it. These are really talented performers. They learn new things very quickly.”
In fact, the technical difficulty of the show increases on a regular basis, if only to stop the skaters from settling into a comfort zone. When, as can easily happen, a fairy crashes into the scenery, the sadistic side of Tony Mercer furtively celebrates: “It’s not her fault, it’s just that her skate got caught in a groove made by another skater. It’s the sort of thing that does go wrong, but these guys are so good you forget how hard, how dangerous, what they’re doing is. An occasional crash reminds everyone and gets the audience on the edge of their seats again.”
The skating surface is a maximum of 55ft wide by 60ft deep – 14 tons of ice in a 3in-deep paddling pool, kept at a constant -8C by more than 10 miles of tubing, similar to that found at the back of your fridge. This is not a lot of space to fit in 20 performers, some of them travelling faster than 20mph, especially not when most of them have come from Olympic-size, international-quality rinks. “When I first arrived,” Woeztel says, “it felt like learning to skate on an ice cube.”
It took her, as it takes most skaters, a month to get acclimatised, although in her case it was made more difficult by a strong case of vertigo, caused by suddenly finding herself higher than her audience. Newcomers must learn, most importantly, to act, but they must also learn new techniques: to jump more for height and less for carry, and to find the momentum for those jumps, as well as for most of the lifts, not from straight-line speed, but from accelerating in a tight curve.
Even within these limitations, Kyklov can pack 3 ½ turns into a single leap, and the tight dimensions only emphasise the thrilling sense of velocity for the onlooker. By contrast, and notwithstanding Sharutenko’s brave, beautiful toe balance, a convincing stillness is harder to come by. When I suggest to Mercer that this must limit the dramatic and lyrical possibilities of working on ice, he turns suddenly evangelical: “What you’ve just done is compare this show to ballet – and even I do that sometimes – but it’s wrong and it’s unfair. People call what we do ‘ballet on ice’ or ‘theatre on ice’, but it isn’t. To be honest with you, even I don’t know exactly what it is. Except that it’s a fresh palette. Somewhere we can do anything we want.”
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