The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  The figures in Bill’s painting are not trapped in one place and time. Carolyn Brown, one of the lead dancers for Merce Cunningham’s avant-garde dance company (whose workshop was located near to Bill’s studio when he first moved to New York), has described Cunningham’s approach to choreography: ‘The dances are treated more as puzzles than works of art; the pieces are space and time, shape and rhythm.’ Space and time, shape and rhythm likewise lie behind Bill’s way of working. Although Rink depicts an apparently impetuous, joyous free-for-all – not the ambitious speed of forward movement that intrigued Leonardo, or the rigid aesthetics of professional figure skating – it does so through a careful composition, using all a body’s knowledge of movement.

  A new airport was required for the capitol region, but where to build it? Airport locations are generally selected for their neutral setting: in this case, surveyors explored the mudflats on a bend of the Potomac River a few miles south of Washington DC. Pilots from different airlines made test flights over the area, and the US Weather Bureau collected year-round studies of weather conditions. On Gravelly Point the approaches to proposed runways from eight directions were clear for sufficient distances to provide ideal flight angles. The only problem with the location was that most of the proposed site was underwater. On 21 November 1938 construction began with one shovelful of grit, ceremonially deposited by President Roosevelt; over the following year almost 20 million cubic yards of gravel were imported to raise the ground. The airport was an ultramodern development. Contemporaneous accounts boast of its exemplary handling of planes, air traffic and field traffic control, the fine lighting, and not least the design of its buildings, and facilities for public comfort and convenience.

  It was not just the fabric of the terminal that changed during the 1990s. Originally called Gravelly Point Airport after its location, then Washington National Airport, the name was changed once again in 1998 to incorporate Ronald Reagan’s, even though (as people pointed out at the time) ‘Washington’ was already named after a president. Regardless of these superficial changes, the pilots continue to descend from all over North America, using the river visuals of the Potomac which flows on a course it has kept to since the seas receded from the land 20 million years ago. Sometimes the air will be cold enough to show the planes’ condensation trails; I wonder how Bill might depict them – surely they would appeal to his fascination for evanescent patterns.

  But Bill hasn’t finished with skaters. Before we go our separate ways he talks of his ambition to make a sculpture to fill the Royal Academy’s great court. He imagines skaters of all sizes and shapes, cut from Corten steel – swirling in space, casting shadows on the flagstones and reflected in the windows of the grand Italianate facades of the Learned Societies. Later, leaving the Academy, I cross the courtyard that he imagines filling with his vectorized skaters. It occurs to me it’s just about the right size for a real ice rink. Could Bill’s imagined skaters find themselves gliding alongside real ones? Might researchers in the great double-height libraries of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Geological Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry that surround the quadrangle put down their theses at lunchtime and descend from their attics to lace up a pair of skates?

  III

  The summer of 2017 is the hottest on record in England. The temperature at Heathrow reaches 34.5°C on 21 June. To cool off, I hunt down a favourite childhood story: Noel Streatfeild’s novel White Boots, about child skaters Harriet and Lalla. It’s thirty years since I’ve read the book, and I have to borrow a copy from a neighbour. The red cloth is faded, the corners soft and bumped. The title is gilt-stamped on the spine, but the gold has worn away everywhere but in the serifs. The pages are spotted and dog-eared, and even torn where they have been turned too eagerly. ‘Please be careful with it,’ Caroline says. ‘I’ve had it since I was eight years old.’ Her name is neatly inscribed on the flyleaf, together with an address in Barbados. She also read it in the sun.

  Harriet is convalescing from a serious illness, and looks like a daddy-long-legs. Her family doctor recommends exercise. When she visits the ice rink for the first time the reader senses from Streatfeild’s description that the encounter, though Harriet doesn’t yet know it, will shape her life:

  She gazed with her eyes open very wide at what seemed to her to be an enormous room with ice instead of floor. In the middle of the ice, people, many of whom did not look any older than she was, were doing what seemed to her terribly difficult things with their legs. On the outside of the rink, however, there were a comforting lot of people who seemed to know as little about skating as she did, for they were holding onto the barrier round the side of the rink as if it was their only hope of keeping alive, while their legs did the most curious things in a way which evidently surprised their owners. In spite of holding onto the barrier quite a lot of these skaters fell down and seemed to find it terribly difficult to get up again.

  By coincidence, the rink is also used by child prodigy Lalla Moore for her daily practice. Lalla is not one of those clinging to the barrier, though she would have good reason to fear the ice: her parents died by misadventure while skating on a lake. She is being brought up by snobbish aunt Claudia to follow in her father’s footsteps as a champion skater. The boots he wore on his final, grim excursion hang over her bed in a glass case. But the white boots of the title are not his; they are the ones that Harriet will wear.

  The girls soon become friends, and Lalla enjoys sharing her skills:

  Lalla, skating backwards, had towed her into the centre of the rink.

  ‘There, now I’ll show you how to start. Put your feet apart.’

  With difficulty Harriet got her feet into the sort of position that Lalla wanted.

  ‘Now lift them up. First your right foot. Put it down on the ice. Now your left foot. Now put it down.’

  When the novel opens Lalla has just passed her Inter-Silver exam with flying colours, but as the Silver exam approaches she is distracted by thoughts of the costumes for her next gala performance and her anticipation of the press response. Wise Nana – who sits by the rink knitting woollens for her charge and does not hold with ice, ‘nasty damp, stuff’ – worries that Lalla is ‘not a child whose work was improved by applause’.

  The advanced figures of the Silver exam require a precision which the free-spirited Lalla can’t quite match. Brackets are a problem, and the change edge loops are the last straw. They demand a different sort of skating: ‘control, and rhythm, both of which she had sometimes, but as well they needed immense concentration . . . somehow, however hard she fought to stop it, her mind would slip off what her feet were doing, and this showed on the ice in a bad tracing.’

  Now I read the novel as a lesson in how to work: Lalla’s ambition and imagination versus serious Harriet’s application. For Harriet seems to enjoy escaping the problems of poverty by focusing on figures. Nana muses: ‘Harriet was not the kind of skater anyone would think about, she never did things which caught the eye, she was always in some corner, or, when they were on the big rink in the centre, working away by herself, practising and practising, and studying her tracings.’ Yet Max, Lalla’s coach, is impressed by her dedication; and her quiet style is captured by a photographer from the local newspaper. The illustration that stays with me is a line drawing of the two girls standing – motionless – in the middle of the rink, holding the evening newspaper open between them. On the front page is the photograph of Harriet. Its publication marks a change in both girls’ lives. Through her encounters with Harriet’s family, Lalla discovers the rewards of life beyond the rink, and Harriet’s talents are endorsed when she receives a pair of the coveted white boots for Christmas.

  Harriet and Lalla play out between them the central conflict of figure skating in the twentieth century: between the tension of compulsory figures (from which the sport gets its name) and creative freestyle. Streatfeild’s novel was published in 1951, and I like to think Harriet’s introverted application to figures, her anxio
us checking of her traces by contrast with Lalla’s extrovert passion for performance, was inspired by real debates within the sport.

  In 1948 the number of figures that skaters needed to demonstrate in competition had been reduced from twelve to six. It was the first sign that the influence of figures was waning, although they still counted for a majority of the overall score. As TV coverage of sporting events grew in the 1960s, so too did the importance of free skating: the repetitive and intricate nature of figures did not make for good general viewing. Neither did the judges’ time-consuming analysis. In 1980, the president of the International Skating Union, Jacques Favart, as if channelling a petulant Lalla, called figures ‘a waste of time’. Worth only 20 per cent of the final score by 1989, they were eliminated entirely from international competition in 1990.

  When I was the same age as Harriet and Lalla, I turned triple salchows on the living room carpet as Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skated their Boléro routine at the Sarajevo Olympics on Valentine’s Day, 1984. Was anyone in England impervious to their charm? Millions of TV viewers watched as the pair performed doomed lovers hurling themselves into a volcano. They skated laps of the rink, scooping up cellophane-wrapped bouquets thrown down by fans, as the score was read out over the tannoy: a unanimous 6.0 from every judge for artistic impression, the highest score in figure-skating history. Describing the ‘plot’ behind the routine, Dean said: ‘It was a volcano erupting and we had to climb to the very top before throwing ourselves into eternity.’ His words could equally have referred to their gruelling training, and subsequent stardom.

  Torvill and Dean’s Face the Music tour received five-star reviews, with newspapers proclaiming ‘a new ice age’. The show came to Whitley Bay Ice Rink in 1995, the year I got my first pair of glasses. I could see everything from my seat at the back of the stands: the monks’ firebrands in the brooding Carmina Burana; the musical notes sewn onto sequined waistcoats in Let’s Face the Music, the final number. I was struck by Dean’s solo, set to the Beatles song ‘Paperback Writer’. Unusually for a pop song, the subject is not love but a man trying to offer a book to a publisher. The book is not a novel but a memoir, constantly added to, about a man who is writing a book. The singer’s revelations about this self-reflexive, Sisyphean endeavour run absurdly counter to the jaunty enthusiasm of the tune. For once Dean skated alone – or rather, his partner was not Torvill but a cumbersome desk complete with typewriter, which he manoeuvred around on the ice. His meticulous skating was pitted against the mess of creative endeavour as he typed pages, then scrumpled them up and threw them away. (Years later, when I saw Tracey Emin’s rumpled Bed incongruously installed on the polished floor of a gallery, I remembered this desk.)

  Many of Torvill and Dean’s routines paid homage to other performance genres: sequences inspired by tap and ballet moves; the circus in Barnum; the musical in Mack and Mabel, and even bullfighting (Paso Doble). Surprisingly few make reference to the ice on which they skate. Their facility is in making ice stand in for something else. Look, they seem to say, loitering in matching denim dungarees in the comic piece Low Commotion, we can saunter around on the ice as if we’re in a farmyard. One exception to the rule is a major production of their professional years, the ice ballet Fire and Ice (1986), a kind of Romeo and Juliet of the elements.

  The Prince of Fire has a vision of the Princess of Ice, pirouetting like a charmed dancer in a musical box, and leaves his own realm to seek her out. In the Kingdom of Ice, he finds he is cold – being naked apart from a scarlet thong, wristlets and knee pads – and he’s puzzled by the way his skate-free feet behave on the strange, slippery ground. The clumsiness of the famous champion compared to an agile troupe of shimmery spandex ice spirits is played for laughs. But one experienced skater offers help: the princess twirls demurely into view and provides him with a pair of scarlet skates. She takes his hands in hers, leading him around her icy world until he grows accustomed to his blades. When her venerable father sees them skating in harmony he is furious; he imprisons the prince in a huge block of ice. But the princess’s passion melts the cold cage . . . and after an apocalyptic battle between their respective armies, the pair skate off together. A happy ending, assuming fire and ice can co-exist.

  Some works acknowledge the ice on which they are danced with more subtlety. The competition set piece Oscar Tango is skated in silence. Watching a grainy recording of the championship at which it was first performed, I sense the unease in the audience, which grows to a murmur of surprise as the performers continue unabashed – without music. Just audible over the audience reaction is a noise usually disguised by soundtrack: the scrape of the blades slicing the ice as the dancers circle, and the thud when they stamp their feet. The cold surface on which the sultry dance is conducted betrays its own nature, as well as the percussive potential skaters usually strive to avoid.

  In choosing Boléro as a musical setting, the pair broke from convention again. Ravel’s composition lasts 18 minutes, but Olympic figure skating routines must not exceed 4 minutes. An arranger was commissioned to shorten Ravel’s piece, but he could not compress it beyond 4 minutes 28 seconds without cutting the fiery crescendo. However, Dean knew that the judges’ stopwatch would only begin when the skaters’ blades touched the rink. He choreographed several bars at the beginning of the routine in which he and Torvill would be on their knees, blades poised above the ice, moving only their arms and torsos.

  As with all great artists, people said of Torvill and Dean, they make it look so easy. The splits, the overhead lifts that turn into somersaults, the perfect heart shape that Torvill traces with her blades in Fire and Ice. But break down these movements into their component parts, and they seem much more daunting. I look at the illustrations for a guide to figure skating published in 1921, three years before the inaugural Winter Olympics. The author, Bror Meyer, was a minor Swedish champion. Perhaps the earliest rumblings of changes were in the air and Meyer wished to ensure the sport as he knew it was preserved: he attempts to show readers, as if they were on the ice with him, exactly where to place their feet. Something of a challenge in the days before video and online access, and the wealth of detail that they offer, became ubiquitous. Meyer decided, ‘after great consideration, to illustrate the work by means of photographs taken with a Cinematograph’. The images capture every stage of the skater’s movement. Described on the title page as ‘illustrations from motion picture photography’, they are reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s experimental photographs of people and animals in motion from the 1870s.

  I begin my lessons with Bror Meyer. Figure 1. The solitary skater is superimposed on a stock Alpine landscape, with snowy peaks and pine-forested slopes. In each illustration, a tiny skater progresses across the page, with infinitesimal variations, moving along a series of lines which indicate the strokes their blades have left upon the ice. Meyer explains that a figure is so called because it is based on the figure eight: two circles back to back, sometimes three. For the simplest figure, the circle eight, a circle is skated on an edge of the blade on one foot, then another circle is skated on the corresponding edge on the other foot. He continues: ‘The change of foot at the centre is accomplished by a thrust from the former skating foot onto a strike by the new skating foot at the point of intersection of the two circles.’ These elementary figure eights can be endlessly adapted by varying the thrust and strike, and dividing each circle up through different turns, such as a three turn or bracket turn at the halfway point. Meyer progresses through loops, with their paragraph and serpentine variants and the change-edge loops that caused Lalla such grief. But the text is turgid, and would be incomprehensible without the cinematograph images.

  Rob roars with laughter when I tell him that I found it difficult to learn figure skating from a century-old book. After giving up on Meyer, I sent Rob an email to ask about figures. He’s on holiday, but – as if realizing the true gravity of the situation – he suggests meeting straight off his bus from the airport the foll
owing evening. It transpires he’s just reluctant to go back to his cold narrowboat after a dose of winter sun. He explains that from October onwards, when you leave a boat it’s a good idea to let the stove burn at a very low heat all day, so you can light the fire easily when you get back. It is counter-intuitive, he says, to leave a fire burning in a boat. But he’s been away for a week and the embers will be dead.

  As an athletic child, Rob accompanied his sister to the rink when she began skating and discovered an aptitude for the sport himself. His parents saved to fund his coaching, spent hours driving him to and from the rink every weekday before and after school. ‘You’re a teenager, your mates are at discos,’ he reminisces. ‘And you’re stood in a freezing cold ice rink, on a clean piece of ice, wearing clothes you’re not sure why you’re wearing them. And you push out backwards, go round in a circle, change. Change the edge, go round the circle the other side, backwards. And the circles have to line up, perfectly, each time you do it, three times around for each one.’

  He is so engaged in the memory that without thinking he gets up from his chair and sketches out the turns in his trainers while he is talking. The café manager knows Rob, and smiles at him before returning to her service.

  ‘There is the adage that watching figures is like watching paint dry, and we’d say that doing them is like being the paint. It’s agony. For a good forty-five minutes you just stand on the ice and go round in circles.’

  When the ISU ended the requirement for figures, every skater Rob knew was over the moon. ‘But at the same time we thought, how many hours of our lives have we spent doing this?’

  Rob’s story began where White Boots breaks off: a stellar rise through British figure skating, reaching the very top for his age group. He quit the sport while he was ahead, after competing in the European youth championships at the age of eighteen. Does he regret all those hours of practice, the discos missed? Not really, he tells me. The figures not only improved his basic skating technique; they instilled the mental discipline required for other aspects of the sport. He winces as he describes the determination required to practise a jump if you have already fallen four times on the ice, and know you will fall again on the fifth. In acclimatizing the body to disappointment, figures were a good lesson for life.