Herald Sun, Australia
By Alison Barclay
OLGA Sharutenko's command of English is strong, but in Australia the perversity of the local lingo - as enshrined in opening-night review, - is stronger. Did they like her, or did they not? "Tony," said the leading lady of Swan Lake on lce to her producer Tony Mercer, "what is a 'kick-ass Odette'?"
"It means you showed the swan maiden as a downtrodden girl who nevertheless became part of the decision-making process," Mercer replied in his best empowerment-speak. "I think she wears that badge with pride," he says, recalling how the young Russian went on her way in smiling bemusement.
If so, it's a new form of chest decoration for Sharutenko, who in her figure-skating career is used to more straightforward honours such as Junior World Champion (1995) and Russian Champion (1996, 1997, 1998). An invitation from Torvill and Dean to appear in their television series Dancing an Ice was an obvious compliment too.
But this month the muscly blonde minx is gliding out in something less easy to quantify. Swan Lake on Ice is the latest confection by the Imperial Ice Stars, a 24-strong troupe from Moscow who as competition skaters won more than 200 medals across Europe, Canada and Asia.
The show has impressive statistics: 14 tonnes of ice made from 14,000 litres of water ("the same weight as nearly three elephants". says the facts sheet) in a 15m by 15m stage rink that takes more than 140 hours to build, with help from 15km of refrigeration pipes.
Given the Ice Stars' previous show Sleeping Beauty on Ice played to more than 500,000 people worldwide, Swan Lake is likely to fly high with the public.
But the week after Swan Lake's world premiere in Sydney, Mercer is still hesitant He has taken a tale famous only as Marius Petipa's ballet and which - 129 years after its debut - has dared to jump genres for the first time.
"It is interesting what people expect to see," the English-born, Moscow-based impresario says. "Swan Lake has its roots very deeply in the ballet, which is what Tchaikovsky originally wrote the music for. Or did he?"
Urged by his co-producer James Cundall to adapt Swan Lake for the deep-freeze, Mercer fetched Tchaikovsky's original scores from the Bolshoi archives.
"I was surprised there were 3h hours of music in there, music I hadn't heard in the ballet performance I had just watched," he says. "You realise Tchaikovsky didn't start to write this as a ballet. It's hard to know what happened, because there are no notes about Swan Lake's creation.
"Tchaikovsky seemed to have written it as a piece for himself, just to play around with. Then the order came to write Swan Lake and he used some of what he had." Thus liberated, Mercer chose "not to disrupt the fairytale too much" when he called in the choreographers (including his wife, Maria Orlova) to reset the story on Russia's top skaters.
Though a perfectionist "I am a Virgo," he declares - he is realistic: some notorious aspects of the ballet, such as the Black Swan's 32 fouettes, are impossible to reproduce on blades. "It is wrong to compare. Our show should be allowed to live and breathe for what it is," he says.
Mercer got his start in showbusiness when his drama teacher in Manchester derided his acting and dispatched him to man the lights. He went on to design the lighting for performers such as Dionne Warwick and, 10 years ago, began going to Moscow to organise tours of ice shows.
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