The Times, UK
Can Swan Lake on Ice be more than a kitsch fest? Donald Hutera meets the director who is sure it can
Australia, it must be said, is an awful long way to go to see a production called Swan Lake on Ice. Try telling friends of your plan and they’ll think you’re a little nuts. The image the title conjures of po-faced fairytale balletics, glitz and kitsch, simply doesn’t seem to justify the hours in long-haul.
This is just the sort of amused scepticism that Tony Mercer, the artistic director of the Imperial Ice Stars, must face all the time. “Ice skating has been treated seriously only as a sport,” he sighs. “I don’t think it’s ever been allowed to grow up. It’s always been seen as children’s entertainment, or a Christmas thing. Or else there’s the exhibition performance where someone buys six champions, lets them go and do their thing and that’s it. Yes, it’s great skating, but it’s not what I would call value-for-money theatrical entertainment.”
Mercer’s mission is to change all that. We’re sitting in a restaurant in the Star City casino, hotel and theatre complex in Sydney. It was here that Swan Lake on Ice opened at the start of an 80-week world tour. At least 26 of them will be in Britain, starting at the Lowry, in Mercer’s home city of Salford, on October 16.Like its hit 2005 predecessor, The Sleeping Beauty on Ice, Swan Lake features a cast of more than 20 former Olympic, World, European and National Championship competitive skaters. Nearly all are Russian and between them they have bagged more than 200 medals.
Anyone coming to see this lot in action across some 14 tons of frozen water is sure to walk away thrilled by their technical skills. Mercer, however, hopes that their work elicits a deeper response. “We’re not just trying to do a typical ice show,” he says. “With Sleeping Beauty I tried to create something that contained great skating, but also asked to be treated seriously as theatre. With Swan Lake I want to move beyond that, to push it further and show that ice skating can deliver emotion as well as elements.”
Ah yes, elements. This is an important term in professional skating, in which applying words such as “stunt” and “trick” to triple toe loops, double axels or rotation jumps is tantamount to an insult. But where, you might wonder, in the midst of all of those remarkable feats of skill and daring, is the emotion? This is precisely Mercer’s point.
“Too often ice shows tend to take the elements, put a costume on them and think that is enough to create a character,” Mercer says. “For me this doesn’t work. As a skater you might have that medal in your pocket, but you have got to go out there and make the audience believe that you are that fictional person — that Olga Sharutenko is Odette for this particular evening, and that Vadim Yarkov understands the intricacies of the challenge that playing Siegfried places upon him. Only after they accomplish that can we try to push what they do as figure skaters.”
Odette is the spellbound heroine of Tchaikovsky’s 19th-century ballet, and Siegfried the Prince whose love could convert her from forlorn bird back to flesh-and-blood woman. These are very emotional roles, embodying grand themes of betrayal and redemption. So how are the skaters rising to the challenge? Although Sharutenko and Yarkov have been working with Mercer for nearly a decade, they recognise how much there is still to learn in becoming an Imperial Ice Star. Sharutenko, who was thrilling as John Barrowman’s partner in TV’s Dancing on Ice, laughs when asked if, after exposure to Mercer, Russian skaters will automatically have a better grasp of the acting methods of their countryman, Constantin Stanislavsky. ‘Tony is our Stanislavsky! It’s funny, but it seemed impossible for me when I first heard that we were going to try to do Swan Lake. Not to follow exactly the ballet, but to try to tell the story in our way.
“In competition you have to be perfect in technical things, and do exactly correctly and cleanly all your lifts, jumps and spins. Here you put those elements, and all you have learnt from your previous sport life, inside a character. It is the most important, difficult and interesting thing for me to do. Without that, the audience wouldn’t really understand what you are trying to tell them. They might be thinking, ‘What was this jump about?’ ” Yarkov, whose English is more limited, echoes his co-star. “It’s very difficult to deliver my part because it has so many nuances. I start very funny, and in the middle I’m upset.” How does he negotiate those changes? “We have first an idea or emotion. Then with great elements we can set this idea out. But first comes the idea.”
Mercer’s theatrical career began as a lighting designer and tour manager for musical acts such as the Three Degrees and the Four Tops. He began working with skaters in 1993 at a company called Wild Rose Ice Theatre. By 2004 he had broken away to form the Imperial Ice Stars, sealing his reputation as a maverick. He has ignored the rigid categories that usually govern competition skaters doing theatrical performances.
“There are guidelines about what you can do. Dance pairs, like Torvill and Dean, don’t do jumps or lifts above a certain height. Sports pairs do, but they perform together side by side so they don’t dance. Then you have single boys and girls who don’t touch anybody, they’re just jumping, spinning machines.” In Mercer’s company all of this gets scrambled. “Olga’s an ice dancer and Vadim’s a competitive sports boy, so there’s a marriage in there of two disciplines. And with that you get an extra dimension of creativity.”
Mercer is bracing himself for the treatment his rethink of Swan Lake, with its mix-and-match use of Tchaikovsky, might receive from some of Britain’s more purist dance critics. “I think ice skating is a genre on its own that should be judged on its own. But, for whatever reasons, it’s always compared to the ballet. All I ask is, please, don’t compare us to anything else. Matthew Bourne is allowed to go out and do something different with Swan Lake and it’s OK. Just judge us on what we are.”
Swan Lake on Ice, The Lowry, Salford (www.imperialicestars.com 0870 7875790), Oct 17-21; touring until June 2007