We asked Alexandre Hamel, Founder of Le Patin Libre to tell us more about the origins of the company, and how a group of former competitive ice skaters began to make art on ice. His words are evocative, and a wonderful video about the making of the work they're performing in Guelph is at the end of this post. You should definitely scroll all the way through and watch it!
Le Patin Libre performs on Stage A, Friday, June 3, 8 pm, at the University of Guelph's gold ice rink. They also teach an ice skating workshop, suitable for all levels, on Saturday, June 4, 9:30 am.
Tickets available by clicking here or by phoning 519-763-3000.
Photos by Alicia Clarke
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Vertical Influences is a contemporary ice-skating
show.
Now, what's contemporary ice-skating? It's the
result of a 10-year artistic adventure.
I launched Le Patin Libre in 2006. I was then a
retiring figure skater. I competed on the international scene, skated
professionally for Disney On Ice and in a few other big traditional figure
skating shows. Sparkles and all... In 2006, I was also a Fine Arts student, at
Concordia University in Montreal. I was studying film production.
During the 15 years of my intensive training as a
figure skater, I always felt I didn't fit into what figure skaters reverently
call “Le Monde du Patin,” or “The Skating World.” I always found my training
companions very obedient and blindly engulfed in this closed universe of
competition, hyper-sexualisation, drama, superficialism and....sparkles, always
more sparkles. But, I loved the moves and the challenge so much! I just kept
going until university provided me a good excuse to get out of it. Figure skating
is like a sect. It's not that easy to get out of, especially after your parents
have “invested” $15,000 a year in that weird training, secretly and crazily
hoping you'll be an Olympic champion.
At university, I was part of little indie video
projects. I loved it! Still infused with the love of skating, I gathered a few
skaters I knew to launch a little indie ice-show project. It seemed natural to
me. This doesn't exist in figure skating, however. Normally, it's all about big
money, big producers, big sport federations, an establishment approving it all,
etc.
So, year one of the project included a few short
performances on frozen ponds in little towns around Montreal. We performed in
winter carnivals. It was simple and naive. Good skaters, funny numbers, a bit
of acrobatics, a slightly rock 'n roll attitude and....finally... no sparkles!
Not a single one! I called the troupe Le Patin Libre. It means The
Free Skate.
The shows were prepared very quickly because we
didn't have access to much ice time, between hockey games and traditional
figure skating stuff. Doing anything happy and un-conservative is forbidden at
public skating sessions (even empty ones), so we could not dance or practice
there. We did rehearse outdoors, in the winter, but that's often unreliable and
feet freeze in an hour in those horrible hard-leather tight ballet shoes with
blades.
However simple and quickly thrown together, our
little shows pleased people. The local media talked about “rebel figure skaters,”
the troupe grew, and we were quickly invited to France for shows organized by
private ice rinks.
In France, we were offered a deal: do a few shows
for free in exchange for practice ice time. All of the ice rinks are empty at
night and in the morning, when hockey players are at work or at school. In
city-run ice rinks, the bureaucracy makes such deals impossible, but in the
private ice rinks of France, we just borrowed the keys from the owners and went
skating for long hours whenever the ice rink was closed or unused. At night, sometimes!
We started to go often, for residences that grew longer and longer. We
literally exiled in France, to have access to this ice time.
Finally having time to do more than just throw shows
together, we started to ask ourselves deep questions:
· Why are
we doing ice shows?
· Why do we
stick with this thing even though ice rinks are so complicated?
· Why do we
freeze our asses in sad looking, foul-smelling refrigerated garages?
I don't even remember how it came to us but the
answer was simple: Glide!
It's what makes hockey more exciting than soccer.
It's what makes surfing more sexy than beach volley-ball. It's why people fly
to the Rockies to ski, when they could snowshoe in their backyards.
Glide is the possibility to dissociate movement
through space from the gestures organically associated to human locomotion:
walking, running, jumping, crawling, etc. This means a body can be immobile but
move quickly. One of the skating-artists of the troupe calls it “grounded
flight.”
Glide is the only thing we have and that dancers,
circus artists or comedians don't have.
Glide is what's left when you take out those damned
sparkles. And I mean “sparkles” in the large sense: TV shows, podiums, judging
systems, syrupy music, themes, commentators, princesses.
Later, I would learn that glide is our specificity.
With it, we could reach artistic modernity.
And we understood right away that the choreographic
possibilities would be endless and completely new.
As soon as we were conscious of this, our shows
started to feel better, richer and more natural. Our years of training as
top-level figure skaters finally made sense! Where we felt compelled to add
barrel jumping, tap skating and fire breathing (check our YouTube channel), in
our first naive years, we started to just glide. Simple, pure and rigorously
choreographed glide.
And the rest is just lots of sweat, big financial
risks and the lives of 5 skating-artists completely invested in this over the
course of a few years.
To make the story short, we developed that stuff,
self-produced a show in London after another one of those residences in Europe,
had a little box-office success, were noticed by the programmers of a big
theatre and of a big dance festival (Sadler's Wells and Dance Umbrella), were
offered real residencies and professional support and finally developed Vertical Influences. It got us some
awards and accolades, and the show is so fun to do, I would perform it even if
I were invisible.
So, that's what we're bringing to Guelph! And by the
way, Guelph's Arena is not smelly and not even that cold! It's a really good
one, and I'm not only saying this because they agreed to cancel a few hockey
games to let this happen. We can't wait!
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Check out this wonderful video about the making of Vertical Influences
