Most of Taiwan rarely sees snow, but starting today and running through the next few weeks, there will be a chill in the air. That is, if you are anywhere close to the venues for the St Petersburg State Ballet on Ice.
During a four-city tour, the long-standing Russian ice ballet troupe will perform two famous ballets with music composed by Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake and Nutcracker.
Nutcracker, an all-time favorite ballet of the young and old, is a fairy tale focusing on three characters: a girl named Clara, the nutcracker, a handmade toy that Clara gets for Christmas, and the evil mouse king.
At a Christmas party, Clara takes the nutcracker as a gift from the host of the party, Drosselmeier. Then she falls into a fantasy world. The mouse king with his mice brigade starts to destroy toys while Clara helps the nutcracker and his soldiers to fight back and save the toys. As they defeat the evil mice, Clara turns into a beautiful princess and the nutcracker into a handsome prince.
What follows is a celebration. A gala of dances from all over the world are performed. As the celebration ends, the dream world vanishes as well. Clara is back to reality, on a Christmas night, with her new toy, the nutcracker.
Swan Lake is another fairy tale with a love story, only one with a sadder tone. Princess Odette is turned into a swan by the evil magician Rothbart and can only return to human form for a few hours every night. On one of these occasions, Prince Siegfried meets Odette and falls in love with her. He also promises to rescue her. Later, in his castle, Siegfried is holding a ball to choose a bride. Rothbart sends in his daughter Odile, dressed as a black swan. Siegfried thinks she is Odette and quickly declares her his bride. Then the real Odette appears. Saddened by the fact that the prince has broken his promise, she runs away to the lake. Siegfried follows her to the lake and earns her forgiveness.
But this enrages the evil magician Rothbart, who plots his revenge, which leads to the climax of the play.
Both ballets, as performed by the ice ballet troupe, last around two hours and feature more than 100 elaborate costumes and full opera house sets.
The Russians set themselves apart from most ice ballet troupes by choosing to focus on artistic form instead of elaborate stunts that highlight their physical skating talent. "We perform full length ballet pieces," says Mikhail Kaminov, the troupe's manager and a champion figure skater in Russia. "It's a superb art combining figure skating and classical ballet."
The troupe also features its principal choreographer, Konstantin Rassadin. Rassadin has been crowned a ballet "star" for 23 years and has performed with famous dancers such as Rudolf Nuryev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He will help coordinate the 32-person team for their 12 performances around the island.
As for the ballet dancers, they are quite young, averaging 22-years-old. Most of them started training as ice skaters in their early teens and received further training in ballet dancing once recruited.
Even more graceful on ice, the ballet dancers achieve a feeling of smoothness and elegance that is more difficult to attain through regular ballet. The ice vapor also adds a fairy tale atmosphere to the performance that already looks exotic from the vintage looking costumes of the dancers.
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