It was strange enough to see a performance in person. Try to be in a park at dusk and sit on the same stage as the performers: a sheet of ice. The public’s ice rink section was covered, but despite the mild April night, a fresh breeze was still blowing around your ankles.
On Tuesday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented their first live performance in more than a year with Le Patin Libre (“Free Skate” in French), a contemporary Montreal skating company. The performance at the lakeside LeFrak Center in Prospect Park even brought out Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said in a pre-performance speech, “When the cultural community comes back, all things are possible.”
That’s probably because culture is usually one of the last things to come back, but well – it’s been a long year. It was nice to see bodies moving in space. And skating is something bigger than a blade and a body: it’s the idea to fly, to fly, to resist gravity. By nature, skating is an uplifting act and art.
Due to its personal rarity, this show, a mixture of skating and dancing, had a lot to offer – maybe too much. Not every show is going to deliver transcendence, although after so much time performing live there is an expectation, good or bad; “Influences” weren’t particularly bad, but hardly euphoric.
As for the performance itself? It was fine up to a point – this ensemble, founded in 2005 by Alexandre Hamel and other skaters, has set itself the goal of making skating more inclusive and celebrating aspects that are unrelated to scoring competitions do have. (Even so, the crowd was happiest to applaud the tricks.) I love skating, especially when it’s otherworldly and hypnotic; But the Le Patin Libre program was full of starts and stops. The electronic score sometimes sounded like a thin drum machine.
“Influences” was the title of the program as well as a work from 2014 that filled the second half of the evening, often in an obvious way to examine the subject of the individual vis-à-vis the group. Vignettes focused on bullying, or the playful tension between rivals. This stand-alone work had a quality that was both expansive and predictable, as the skaters took turns at certain moments. Taylor Dilley gives his skating a sense of weight and control in the martial arts as he curled up in deep, low turns and hooked one leg behind the other. Samory Ba, tall and lanky, possessed an elegant, unmanned daring.
All performers, including Pascale Jodoin and Jasmin Boivin – the composer and musical director of the group – are credited with the choreography, some of which could have been better served by a stronger point of view. This company is big at gliding, and that’s powerful: that’s what figure skating is all about. Yet even when skating phrases reflected the intricate footwork of the dance in an interesting way, the choreography repeated itself.
And all night there were moments of stomping and knocking with skaters treating the ice like a dance floor. it doesn’t always look as innovative as it needs to feel. In a way, the short introductory pieces – no titles were given – were more succinct in how they showed the tight quality of the group. Exciting moments of bird watching, in which skaters move like a flock of birds or a school of fish, showed the momentum: deep edges, river and that gliding again.
In the last brief piece of work, Jodoin, the only woman and one of the directors of the group, led the others in a back and forth pattern that snaked gently across the expanse of ice. Eventually their space narrowed as the skaters – their arms swayed, their blades moving briskly – wound in and out of a narrow figure eight. The lights dimmed as their blades continued to scratch; Now in silhouette, the skaters rode their bodies with a powerful, muscular ease. It was nice to see, but somehow even better to feel: even though they were wearing masks, you could feel that these bodies were breathing as one.
Free skating
Until April 11th at the LeFrak Center in Lakeside, Prospect Park, Brooklyn; bam.org/influences.
