Ally Pally is a vast frozen canvas, as five figures scissor across the ice. Trip-hop drumming rings out. This is as far from Torvill and Dean as you can get.
Back home in Montreal, Canada, Le Patin Libre (“The Free Skate”) performed on frozen ponds and canals as they created a new contemporary ice skating that fuses choreography, urban dance, theatre, tap and circus skills.
London’s Dance Umbrella Festival has commissioned a special double-bill from them. You watch, dazzled, as the five-strong collective compete against each other, flirting, mock-fighting, dragging skates backwards, seemingly against gravity. One minute they’re five young gunslingers, cool and arrogant, the next they’re performing (highly skilled) pratfalls on the ice.
They work their blades — and bodies — hard to tell us their stories, scoring marks in the ice with feet, hands, torsos. Le Patin Libre are famous for their “glide” — as they travel up to 30km an hour while holding a single pose.
In the second act, the audience are seated on the ice. The “dancers” skate right at us, then stop, teasing, just before impact. Lights flick on and off, so we lose track of their movements. Then a moment of ravishing beauty as they glide past in unison like swans.
It’s witty and experimental. And, best of all, Le Patin Libre have a horror of Olympic-style formality. At the end of the show they come out to meet the audience, determined to break down elitist barriers.
Until tomorrow (danceumbrella.co.uk)
