Show Business: Ballet Dancing on the Ice

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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.