Ballet Dancing on the Ice

By Gerald Clarke

Olympic Champ John Curry turns old sport into new art

I am a skater." says John Curry firmly." I believe that the word skater has the same value as the word dancer." In fact, Curry is both an ice skater who dances and a ballet dancer who ice skates. The title of his new show, which opened at Manhattan's Felt Forum last week: Ice Dancing.

By whatever name it goes, however, Curry's show, which includes twelve other talented skater-dancers, is one of the most sumptuous treats of this year's holiday season, two hours of fascinating movement and sometimes astonishing beauty. It is at once brand new, perhaps even pioneering, and reassuringly familiar, the combination of two long-established disciplines to create something strikingly fresh and original.

Curry, 29, an Englishman who won the gold medal for men's figure skating at the 1976 Olympics, was inevitably offered high-paying jobs by various ice shows. He turned them all down to pursue his own vision. "I don't like to criticize them," he told a reporter, "but I feel they are an antiquated form of entertainment. When I go to see ice shows, I don't actually see much skating. What I see is a lot of spectacle, a lot of camouflage, a lot of substitution, and very little of the real thing." What Curry wants to see is "a skater who draws a pattern of music in the air." The spectator should, he believes, "stop seeing the steps, the effort behind it all, and start seeing that it's a physical representation of the music."

To construct the kind of ice show he envisioned. Curry choreographed two numbers himself and invited eight choreographers from the dance world -- Peter Martins, Twyla Tharp, Norman Maen, Kenneth MacMillan, Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, Donald Saddler, Douglas Norwick and Robert Cohan -- to do the others. He would explain what a skater could technically do, and they proceeded from there, excited by the prospect of a fluidity and motion denied them on an ordinary dance floor. "John is showing that it's possible to do something on ice that's never been done before," is the enthusiastic comment of Bonnefous, one of the lead dancers of the New York City Ballet.

On occasion the hardboard choreographers show their unfamiliarity with Curry's medium, and a few of the numbers are hesitant and uncertain. Tharp's After All, which features Curry alone, seems curiously stilted, and Saddler's turn-of-the-century Palais de Glace, which involves the whole company, verges on the kind of ice spectacle Curry disdains.

When the show is right, however, it is superb. In Tango-Tango, Peter Martins paces Curry and JoJo Starbuck, another Olympic champion, to the music of Stravinsky and the tango Jealousy by Niels Gade. The result is a dance that is both witty and seductive, a show-stopper that virtually forces the audience from its seats. Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, choreographed by Norman Maen, is the second standout. Cathy Foulkes, who comes on briefly as Curry's partner, is breathtakingly lovely, as slight and slender as a skate blade itself. Curry, an elegant skater, shows his impressive range in Afternoon, gliding through Maen's intricate designs with almost supernal grace, Narcissus on ice. Marilyn Rennagel's lighting is sometimes off in earlier numbers, but in Afternoon she demonstrates an unexpected advantage of a floor of ice. The surface appears to be illuminated from below, alive in speckled highlights of green and brown. Set designs and costumes are excellent.

Curry is the star, but he has a crew of three young enthusiasts who have helped him assemble a first-rate team behind the scenes. The show cost $350,000 to put on, and Curry hopes, if it is a success in Manhattan, to go on a national tour, preaching the gospel of what he regards as a new art form. Judging by early crowds, he already has many true believers. It may not yet have a proper name, but whatever it is called, Curry's ice dancing is pure enchantment.

-- Gerald Clarke

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