MacMadame
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I have two excellent tickets to this for tonight but am not able to go. I posted the details in the Tickets for Sale thread. They include the VIP Meet & Greet
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lol: when Rohene gives a "look" toward the camera as he's skating with Angela Wang):
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ETA - more about IDI’s edge classes before the show:Long-term, my goal is to keep expanding the company with ice dancers of that level. Having skaters like Gabriella, Oona, and Gage involved really helps elevate that vision. Gabriella especially believes strongly in what Ice Dance International is doing. She’s doing so much on social media to promote our tour, our mission and our vision. One of our big goals is eventually taking the company abroad—to Europe—and I think that could happen soon. Gabriella has been very supportive of that idea as well.
Another goal of IDI keep growing to build on our production itself – lighting, video projection, the technical side of the company as well as the skating side so audiences can see dance on ice as a performing art.
The full tour cast: Gage Brown, Oona Brown, Alissa Czisny, Tim Koleto, Jean-Simon Legare, Gabriella Papadakis, Kseniya Ponomaryova, Emmanuel Savary, Angela Wang and Rohene Ward. Collin Brubaker will perform in select cities.
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“Usually when you’re partnering, it’s with the same person, always. So you’re used to that person, but in a group of ten people it’s a lot of people that you’ve never skated with before,” Papadakis says. “You really have to stay alert all the time and pay attention. And that is something I enjoy doing.”
Czisny was a singles skater, winning national titles in 2009 and 2011, and credits IDI with the fact that she’s still skating. “One of the first things I noticed is that I get way less nervous when I skate with other people. It just feels like other people on the ice are a grounding factor for me–you know, being able to look at someone that’s on the ice or hold their hand or skate with them. You have to match timing so you’re consistent every night. But I also think that you can create more as a skater on the ice with other people.”
Garrett Smith, renowned ballet choreographer, developed “Swam,” the sweeping piece that closes out Act I. At one point, all eight skaters come together to join hands. The women on both ends have been lifted above the men, and the unit rotates as one.
“It’s something that you rarely see in skating because we often get stuck in the same structure of thinking and skating. This is what we’ve always done. This is how we’ve done it,” Czisny says. But “Swarm” challenges all of that. “We create some shapes and lifts that are really unique—eight of us in one group, creating not so much a feeling as a visual picture,” she says.
Why isn’t there more of this? I ask Webster. Figure skating has long been the crown jewel of the Winter Olympics, the most watched sport of the winter games. Clips of Liu’s Olympic gala performance to “Stateside” by PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson are still flooding my (admittedly biased) timeline, and now, everyone from Broadway casts to Chinese grandmothers are sharing their own attempts at Liu’s choreography. Baltimore has its own viral skating sensation, Ryan Dunk, who performed with IDI last spring before joining a cruise ship’s skating show. We’re so entertained by skating, yet we have few opportunities to see it live.
ETA: There are photos by David J. Murray and Mark Walentiny (the latter previously has won PSA Photo of the Year awards).Ice itself is a major limiting factor. IDI depends on rinks that will open their doors to Webster’s show and lock up at the end of the night. Webster tells me that it was ice itself that led toward the undoing of John Curry’s show. During their residency at the Metropolitan Opera, a sold-out opening night was lost to a dispute about who could lay down the ice (the Met would not allow Curry’s person to do it, yet the Met staff did not know how to do it themselves), leaving Curry’s company responsible for the opening night loss.
The complexity of straddling the figure skating and dance worlds is another limiting factor. “I think a lot of people have the dream, but it’s daunting to think about how to fund it, how to build an audience, how to do all of that. You know, it took me almost twenty-five years of a career before founding IDI and the experience of working with Disney on Ice and understanding production,” Webster says.
Patrice Hutton's in-depth article for BmoreArt (March 18) after attending the Philadelphia/Ardmore show and interviewing Douglas Webster afterwards:
Excerpts:![]()
Rivalry, Cooled: Ice Dance International Eschews Competition for Passion - BmoreArt
Ardmore, PA: During the day, the Philadelphia Skating Club & Humane Society is lit by the sky. Arched skylights hug the rink’s semicircular ceiling, and a wall of windows provides a forest backdrop at the far end of the ice. Below the sylvan view sits a mirror, meaning the rink both opens out to...bmoreart.com

If only there weren't a Great Lake between usAnyone going to the Mequon show and want to meet up? I'll have some non-skating people with me![]()
Have fun!