Ice Theatre of NY Home Season Performance
Photo: ice theatre of NY, of a performance of "2:1"
Caveat: this review/reaction is besides the point. I think that Ice Theatre of NY's real value is not in what it brings to casual viewers like me, but in what it can bring to competitive or show skaters and their choreographers. In bringing the larger vocabulary of modern dance to the ice, IToNY can and hopefully will show choreographers how much is missing in today's competitive routines, and push the sport forward asthetically. Maybe there's space in a COP routine for IToNY's techniques, maybe not, but I think perhaps the more artistically inclined competitive skaters like Czisny, Weir, Takahashi, Oda, etc, might be able to learn from this, and I know that artistic show skaters like Sasha Cohen could *really* profit from seeing IToNY.
Contents:
- Overly long-winded and hyper-critical general reaction to idea of ice-theatre
- More generous reactions to specific pieces
- Ok, fine, I liked it a lot!
Ice Theatre of NY's mission is to bring performance dance technique and choreography to bear in the ice rink. Not an easy task, for many reasons, ranging from the mundane (ice rinks are cold, and cold audiences on bleachers don't enjoy performances as much as ones who are comfortably seated in faux-velvet seats at a theatre), to the technical (rockered blades slicing through ice lend themselves to the kinds of movement one sees in sport figure skating, and perhaps not as well to modern dance), to the prior knowledge of the audience (we're spoiled by seeing triples and quads performed routinely, and we're conditioned to expect a certain kind of movement and choreography, and when something deviates from that, it's harder for figure-skating audiences to take it on its own merits... what? she just did a layback without going into a Biellmann-- hmm, level 3 at best... oh wait, this isn't COP). The medium demands that it can't be the pure vocabulary of dance, and yet in order to win over skating audiences, it had better be so close to pure dance that we lose ourselves and forget to critique it the way we would a sport routine.
While I enjoyed Ice Theatre's performance, none of it moved me the way Totmyanina's/Marinin Champions on Ice "Phantom of the Opera", which exquisitely performed, but thoroughly mundanely choreographed as a pairs routine. None of what I saw in Ice Theatre moved me the way I've been moved by some Contemporary Ballet companies. Ice theatre's skaters didn't have me picking my jaw up off the floor like Brian Joubert's orgies of power and quadruple-jumps, or like watching NYC Ballet's dancers do gravity-be-damned double jumps in positions as open as most people's waltz jumps. They didn't make me drool myself in the throes of an asthetic crush the way I have when Johnny Weir's been at the top of his game.
Ice Theatre has enough talent, in its skaters and choreographers, that they *should* have been able to rock my world. That they didn't probably speaks to how hard a thing it is that they are attempting. In traditional figure skating, skaters try to sell the illusion of effortlessness, even as they go for quads or triple-triples. Unfortunately, when high intensity jumps and spins are taken out of a routine, that illusary effortlessness turns insipid. On dry land, a dancer -- even the most ethereal of ballerinas -- must visibly put power into their accelerations and jumps. A good skater, on the other hand, can achieve great speed or height by leaning and pushing powerfully but all-too-subtly in a way that makes it seem that the ice itself has accelerated her, and that she put little or no effort into it. Over-using this natural way of moving on ice robs the dance of grit and power.
David Liu, Ice Theatre's resident choreographer and principle dancer, seems to know this very well. In his own solos he uses a lot of fast staccato stops and toe-pick pushes that make it seem that he's dancing on dry land. When he lets the ice do what it does and flows into a spiral or spin or jump, the contrast makes it seem special rather than the ordinary business of skating. Liu, by the way, did a seven minute solo, in the midst of which he did what seemed like a 3-loop, step into 3-axel (my friend says it must have been a 2-axel), pretty much out of nowhere without a long series of power crossovers. Not only does Liu understand that he needs to conciously choreograph difficulty and non-gliding movement, he also can bust-out the technique that made him an Olympian. Nothing short of amazing, and I loved his performances.
On the whole the rest of the performances tantalized me by bringing dry-land dance vocabulary and technique onto the ice, but they didn't seem to have that extra something that made the whole excercice of dance-on-ice entirely worthwhile. I'm really not sure why. Usually the lines of a dancer are so beautiful that I feel they are somehow transcending the ordinariness of the human body. Much of Ice Theatre's dancing seemed to be at an equal level, but it didn't hit me as being equally beautiful. Don't know why.
Don't misunderstand: with the exception of a slightly shaky opening number, and a rather insipid philp glass number (insipid because the skaters didn't seem to be moving themselves, but rather being conveyed by the ice -- a neat trick to use, but it gets boring), the rest of the dancing was realy very good. That it was done on ice makes it remarkable. Ironically though, if exactly the same choreography had been done on a dry-land stage, by dancers of equal talent, I probably would have enjoyed it more.
But I'm being too negative. I really did enjoy a lot of it. Maybe there was just too much of it to take-in in one long, cold sitting. (Unfortunately economics of renting rink time probably makes it difficult to put on shorter shows). I think the biggest problem was that I saw great potential unrealized. If and when someone like Liu can bring the grittiness of dry-land dance to the ice, while also exploiting the magical ability of skaters to move through space without having to move their bodies for propulsion (as in a spiral or lift), it could be really amazing. Till then I think that seeing traditional dry-land technique on ice is neat -- and I hope it influences competitive skaters in their choreography -- but it's not as exceptional to me as what either pure skating or pure dance can be.
In formulating Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee used the maxim "Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own". That's what Ice Theatre needs to do to go from being "interesting and worth it" (which they were) to being great (which is the potential presented by a thorough coupling of dance and skating).
I don't know why I'm being so reserved and qualified in what I'm writing. I mean it really was good shit, and I've never seen anything like it on the ice before. The fact that I've seen a lot like it on dry-land shouldn't detract. As a fan of skating, I feel so much apreciation that they were able to go beyond the traditional conventions of ice-choreography, which let's face it, with COP is as predictable in its paint-by-numbers "now the 3-loop-3-loop, now the layback into beillmnn, end with the scratch spin) as a porno movie. As a clueless audience-member who's occasionally moved to tears by both dance and "traditional" figure skating, tonight's performance just didn't get deep enough into me.
A few specifics:
"2:1": Started in silence with impressively clean, quiet edging by a dancer dancing on, around, and with a chair. I usually try to just apreciate movement-as-movement and to therefore ignore the "but what does it mean?" question. If anything, I parsed "2:1" as being about a threesome that never came to fruition. In this case, I might have done better to read the programe note beforehand: "The relationship between what one imagines if there were two". Ooooh! That explains the very obvious and otherwise incongrous move where the chair-dancer pantomimes fucking the ice. She's imagining, from a solo standpoint, what being in a duet (partnership, couple, etc) could be like. Damn good dancing throughout.
Ole Manolete: Conclusion of the very impressive three part work Mi Andalucia, which included a quartet doing what seemed to be inspired by traditional-folk-dance, and an especially dynamic David Liu flamenco solo with a bullfight theme. Ole Manolete was a Paso Doble themed (dunno about the music, but the theme was Paso Doble) done by a trio. Trio? Yes: a male, a female, and a cape which functioned every bit like a third dancer. Best use of a prop I've seen in recent memory. Satiny Crimson on one side, skin colored on the other, it very much seemed to symbolize the idea of emotional passion within, circumscribed, sometimes contained by, and sometimes sustained by the physical skin outside.
I can't really put words to how well this prop was used, but at times it gave flutering wings to a skater being whirled through the air in a lift, at times it wrapped and unwrapped itself from one dancer to the next, at times it was wielded, at times it seemed to be a living entity occupying its own spatial and kinesthetic territory between the two human dancers. In retrospect, I have to say this was a success of the dance-on-ice concept. The life in the cape came from the way it filled with wind like a sail, and the speeds needed to do that would have been much harder to achieve on dry land. Really hot dance.
"Once Again": The program states "The Duet examines the interplay of male-female dominance and dependance". Maybe if I'd read that before now, I might have been more interested in the dance (unless I'm mistaken, and this *was* the dance with the cape -- Passo Doble definitely has elements of male-female dominance to it -- but I don't think so). As it is, this dance was lost in the wash of the whole performance for me. Male-female dominance is rather cliched to me. Fucking accept it, go beyond it, invert it, subvert it, or do all of that at the same time, but stop dwelling on it, because that just plays into it.
"After All": Seven minute solo piece by David Liu. While the program as a whole seemed overly long to me, to perform in a cold ice-rink, nothing about this particular number seemed long, even though seven minutes is an insanely long time for a solo. David Liu is the shit.
Friend of mine thought he had an overly internal technique-oriented demeanor. Perhaps, but that actually tends to connect with me more than exhuberant performances. People say the same about Weir's skating being too quiet and too internal, and he's my favorite skater.
"Pull": Program Sez: "Improvised responses to the physical and mental challenges posed by the ice". Improvised? There were six people skating this, usually configured as three couples, occasionally as two triplets, and it all seemed very well-planned and choreographed, so I wonder if there was any improv going on during the performance or whether the choreography was inspired and informed by improvisations.
The last words
Notice how I alternate between using the words "skaters" and "dancers" here? I did so unconciously, and maybe that's the real point. I had to respond to this like a dance performance, and I really have a hard time thinking of the performers as anything but dancers. If "skating" is what you do when you do singles, pairs, ice dance or exhibitions and shows, then Ice Theatre's performers were dancers, not skaters. To do so, they have to be accomplished skaters, no doubt, but my initial comments aside, I guess I have to admit that they suceeded in transcending the many of the limitations of dancing on ice. This wasn't "nutcracker on-ice" or "modern dance on-ice", or anything else "on-ice-ified" in any sense but the most literal. This was dance. In a cold-ass theatre to be sure, but it was dance.