January 29, 2010
Awesome, thrilling, spectacular, and very very beautiful. This was my first ice-dance and I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I think I was expecting something lower-budget in all respects than this gorgeously realised and Olympian-standard production. Ice-dance in Russia at any rate, does not bear any relationship to Mr Disney’s excellent products; it is in fact very similar to ballet, only much, much faster. One of my companions dazzled me with technical terms that I didn’t entirely understand such as triple-axles and double-lutzes etc., but the bottom line is, the Russian Ice Stars can do pretty much everything that Olympic medallists can do, only in a far more confined space. I confess I would have been very nervous if I were sitting in the front row.
The effect is to make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes, particularly on those occasions when the handsome prince held Snow White above his head with one arm and spun round very fast, or actually threw her in a graceful, soaring arc across the stage, and she landed perfectly on one foot, skating backwards. Why wasn’t her ankle shattered into thirty tiny delicate pieces? And how, after spinning on the spot so fast that he become a blur for say fifty or sixty rotations, did Toppa the Crow not fall over afterwards? He can’t possibly be doing that thing of whipping his head round that enables ballerinas to pirouette endlessly, because no human can move that fast.
Well, these are mysteries that only skating fans can explain. But what is very clear is that these are people who have dedicated their lives to this art – they are not people who didn’t get into ballet school – and now they have pretty much got it down. They are also stunners, in a wide-cheek-boned, Slavic way, particularly Irina Tkachuk, who was Snow White, Svetlana Kuprina who was awesome as the wicked Queen, and Ekaterina Murugova who was Fua the goose (love those Russian names) and even more so Valdis Mintals (the Prince), Alexei Kozlov (Toppa the Crow), and Sergei Smirnov (Gras the Goose).
You will see from these character names that this isn’t quite the same version of Snow White that we have grown up with, and indeed she stays in the forest with the Seven Woodcutters rather than the Seven Dwarfs – if there was one thing I wished for more of, it was information in the programme about the production itself - where did the story come from, how did the ice-dance version develop? I’d also quite like to know how they make the stage of the New Theatre into an ice rink. A composer and a choreographer are featured, so from this I suppose that the music and the choreography are original, and if so they are in themselves an awesome achievement. The costumes were exquisite.
The whole production was a magnificent vehicle for displaying the virtuosity of the dancers, and the dance was a superb vehicle for telling the story. As with ballet, and silent movies, the dancers have to be able to express their reactions with their faces, and here again they triumphed, inhabiting their characters and engaging the audience’s sympathy. I didn’t quite understand what happened to the wicked Queen in the end; she seemed to do a dance of dazzling viciousness and spite, and then lay down and died. Here again the programme notes left something to be desired.
But this is a mere quibble. All in all, absolutely first-rate, and highly recommended.
The effect is to make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes, particularly on those occasions when the handsome prince held Snow White above his head with one arm and spun round very fast, or actually threw her in a graceful, soaring arc across the stage, and she landed perfectly on one foot, skating backwards. Why wasn’t her ankle shattered into thirty tiny delicate pieces? And how, after spinning on the spot so fast that he become a blur for say fifty or sixty rotations, did Toppa the Crow not fall over afterwards? He can’t possibly be doing that thing of whipping his head round that enables ballerinas to pirouette endlessly, because no human can move that fast.
Well, these are mysteries that only skating fans can explain. But what is very clear is that these are people who have dedicated their lives to this art – they are not people who didn’t get into ballet school – and now they have pretty much got it down. They are also stunners, in a wide-cheek-boned, Slavic way, particularly Irina Tkachuk, who was Snow White, Svetlana Kuprina who was awesome as the wicked Queen, and Ekaterina Murugova who was Fua the goose (love those Russian names) and even more so Valdis Mintals (the Prince), Alexei Kozlov (Toppa the Crow), and Sergei Smirnov (Gras the Goose).
You will see from these character names that this isn’t quite the same version of Snow White that we have grown up with, and indeed she stays in the forest with the Seven Woodcutters rather than the Seven Dwarfs – if there was one thing I wished for more of, it was information in the programme about the production itself - where did the story come from, how did the ice-dance version develop? I’d also quite like to know how they make the stage of the New Theatre into an ice rink. A composer and a choreographer are featured, so from this I suppose that the music and the choreography are original, and if so they are in themselves an awesome achievement. The costumes were exquisite.
The whole production was a magnificent vehicle for displaying the virtuosity of the dancers, and the dance was a superb vehicle for telling the story. As with ballet, and silent movies, the dancers have to be able to express their reactions with their faces, and here again they triumphed, inhabiting their characters and engaging the audience’s sympathy. I didn’t quite understand what happened to the wicked Queen in the end; she seemed to do a dance of dazzling viciousness and spite, and then lay down and died. Here again the programme notes left something to be desired.
But this is a mere quibble. All in all, absolutely first-rate, and highly recommended.