In the 1920s and ’30s, ice shows were virtually nonexistent. Instead, ice carnivals held by U.S. Figure Skating Association clubs were extraordinarily popular. These carnivals promoted ice legends like Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie and were regarded as the pinnacle showcase events for world-class skating talents. When Henie and other skating phenoms turned professional, they created shows that mimicked the carnivals’ most spectacular elements as an outlet for their international stardom. Only then did ice shows take center stage.

Today, large-scale ice tours are breezing into ice venues and arenas worldwide, with major production companies extending their touring schedules and show capacities each year to further the global expansion of this ever-popular form of entertainment. With continuously growing tours from production companies like America-based Disney on Ice, the U.K.’s Stageworks Worldwide, and the Netherlands’s Holiday on Ice Productions aiming to reap recurring revenues from their enchanted audiences, the creative teams behind each tour must face the enormous challenge of producing memorable ice shows for the masses.

Ice Ideas
All ice shows begin with a concept—a lucid vision of a character or scenario to become the backdrop of an elaborate production. Initially, a producer will contract a group of individuals to form a creative team that will facilitate the company’s vision under a set of guidelines, and yet manage the creation of a dazzling ice show that exudes artistic faculty and prowess. A creative team consists of a director, lighting designer, set designer, choreographer, casting personnel, and costume designer—a knowledgable person to cover each and every artistic aspect of the pre-performance.

Disney on Ice boasts a long resume of creative teams that are stacked with behind-the-scenes talent to bring knowledge and experience to each area of their productions. For example, Emmy-Award winner and Olympic choreographer Sarah Kawahara was brought in to choreograph Walt Disney’s 100 Years of Magic, which is currently touring North America; Peter Morse, who has worked with performers like Madonna and Barbra Streisand, did light design for Disney’s Princess Classics, also on tour in North America; and Gregg Barnes, who designed costumes for Flower Drum Song on Broadway, created the lavish royal gowns for Princess Classics.

Like Disney, Holiday on Ice must identify an exceptionally credible creative team that will yield innovative show concepts, a process that is almost as important as casting the actual performers. “We expect them to come up with creative ideas that are flexible,” says Peter O’Keeffe, director of operations and executive producer of new productions at Holiday on Ice. “We try to identify people who’ve got a good feel for what Holiday on Ice is all about, and who have experience on large-scale show productions. We’re always looking for fresh ideas for our shows, but at the same time our general audience will be expecting to see a Holiday on Ice show, and a new show every year, so there’s a format that we try to follow while developing things that are new and surprising.”


Casting to Fit

After an idea from the creative team is approved by producers, casting the characters becomes top priority. However, most ice production companies are in a state of perpetual recruitment and therefore have many possible performers in numerous countries who are constantly training and ready for a call. A production team at Holiday on Ice, which regularly casts Olympic medalists such as Katarina Witt, Surya Bonaly, and Robin Cousins, recently took a casting trip to Moscow, and O’Keeffe says his team successfully identified roughly 60 prospective performance candidates. “If somebody passes an audition now, that doesn’t mean they’re going to work for the company tomorrow,” he explains. “When we have the availability, we will propose that they join one of our shows.”

Amanda Thompson, president of Stageworks, saw a surge of personal letters accompanied by skating videos in her office in Blackpool shortly after the start of the Hot Ice show series at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1994. At that point, traveling from country to country across the globe conducting auditions became an incorporative factor for the Hot Ice casting process, as well.

Likewise, Judy Thomas, talent director and production coordinator for Feld Entertainment, the production company that makes Disney on Ice, holds regular auditions in every city that the show tours depending on which show she accompanies. Additionally she visits national and international figure skating competitions each year to scope out potential recruits. Currently, Thomas is on tour with Princess Classics and will scout 10 U.S. cities from Chicago, Ill., to Tampa, Fla., as the show tours through North America during the first half of the year.


She also views audition tapes of skaters in countries such as Japan, Germany, Poland, and Russia with the help of the Internet. “Five years ago, I would have relied on an agent or skating professional to contact me with potential skaters, and it may have taken months to facilitate,” she says. “Now with the high-tech age, I am often contacted directly by skaters. Video clips and resumes are sent through e-mail; I can request and receive a video tape within days.”

Shows are often cast depending on the specific physical and technical requirements for each role, with the principle characters being given the greatest consideration, followed by chorus performers and several layers of understudies. “If the creative directors come along with a concept and they’re saying, ‘For this number I need a really short guy, but he has to be able to do a triple toe’ or ‘He has to be able to do a back flip,’ we don’t have the same choices as we have in the more standard skating environment,” O’Keeffe says.

Likewise, several children’s stories in Disney on Ice productions, like The Jungle Book, Mulan, and Aladdin, take place in foreign countries. In these cases, casting the principle characters can involve searching for potential candidates who not only have the technical ability, but also physically look like the characters that they will be portraying. “The roles being portrayed usually require a certain look, height, skating ability, or theatrical ability,” Thomas says. “All of these aspects are taken into consideration.”

Learning the Moves

Following proposals for performers to fill each character role from Snow White to The Lion King, players embark on a rehearsal period, which can run anywhere from six to eight weeks in duration for a brand new show. Performers at Disney on Ice dedicate six days a week and eight to 10 hours per day to perfect their roles, Thomas says. But there is more to a typical rehearsal than simply learning the appropriate moves.

Patty Vincent, production performance director for Feld Entertainment and a former Disney on Ice chorus skater herself, has the responsibility of immersing herself in the character that each performer will be portraying, then teaching the performers during the rehearsal period how to physically and mentally become their animated subjects.

For this year’s Princess Classics, a culmination of seven different princess stories featuring Cinderella, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Mulan, and Jasmine from Aladdin, Vincent first watched all seven animated films from start to finish. She observed each character’s body language and posture, as well as any mannerisms and vocal tendencies, and considered how a human would portray them. Vincent took note of the characters’ relationships with each other, and the emotions that they embody within each film. From there, she experimented with evocative movements to try to get a feel for each fictional creature’s presence. “I have to physically become that animation so I can then take it to the ice and show them the particular moves we’re looking for.”Vincent’s role is to work one-on-one with performers at both the principle and understudy levels for several weeks to help sharpen their emotional, physical, social, and mental portrayals of each respective character. On show nights, she sits in the arenas and takes note of audience reactions to the characters and scenes. “When I watch the show, I become an audience member,” Vincent says.

“I see what’s working and what we could strengthen in the characters. I want the characters—these performers—to move me, as the audience would want them to. So I really base a lot of the work that I do on the audience reaction, because the audience tells the truth.”

Making a Name

Marketing an ice show requires more than a good show and a bit of creative inspiration. In most cases, a production company will release a new and innovative production each year to maintain the artistic integrity of its organization while enticing fans to come back for more. For this reason, marketing teams must also redefine their approaches to promoting the shows on a yearly basis.

According to Robert Owen, marketing director for Blackpool Pleasure Beach and the permanent Hot Ice show at Pleasure Beach Arena, finding an angle to create the publicity materials must be based on the show’s theme. “I sit down with Amanda Thompson months before the show opens when she is in the planning stages and discuss what the themes of the show are going to be and what the feeling is going to be like so we can reflect that in the marketing that we are doing,” he says.

Owen says the two markets they target for Hot Ice are tourists, who stay in the park’s resort or at nearby hotels, and also residents who live within an hour to two-hour drive of the arena. He notes that Hot Ice is promoted heavily through advertisements, television, and radio bits, as well as through tour groups who may purchase regional excursion packages that include tickets to a Hot Ice performance.

For a traveling tour, however, marketing efforts must be increased, says O’Keeffe. For Holiday on Ice, which typically spans across Europe on a regular 10-day touring schedule, and has also extended its Colours of Dance tour into regions of Central and South America, national media promotions in countries throughout Western Europe help spread the word about new performances by the popular company. However, in countries such as Venezuela and Guatemala where the Holiday on Ice brand is less known, regional multimedia campaigns are designed to stimulate and attract a local market.

In addition to pre-show PR, Owen says the opening days of a new show can weigh heavily on the performance’s overall success. To that end, it is important for shows such as Hot Ice to attract prominent industry names during its debut week to positively sway audience approval.

“We get all of our group sales people, agents, people who work within the tourism industry, hoteliers, and big companies who buy hundreds and hundreds of tickets off us every year to see the show because then it’s their job to go back and sell the show.”


With Hot Ice shows running from April to November at Pleasure Beach Arena, which is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest purpose-built ice theater, marketing the show has become a yearlong effort for Owen and his five-person marketing squad. This year, the Hot Ice show H20 will open in time for Easter, he notes, and that will be a another key factor in attracting a large portion of vacationing families from the park and local resorts.

Crafting an Ice Show

When a traveling ice production tour arrives at an empty venue or arena for a weeklong set of performance dates, it becomes the crew’s responsibility to quickly and efficiently unload and assemble lighting, special effects, props, and the set, as well as any consumer merchandise that will help market the tour on show nights.

Holiday on Ice requires a permanent 20-person touring crew ranging from a bookkeeper and secretary to lighting and sound specialists for any given tour, like its new Hollywood production, currently touring Germany and France with a stage that is designed to look like a Hollywood film set. In cases like this, O’Keeffe notes that arenas where the show tours often volunteer local workers to assist the Holiday on Ice crew. “When we’re installing a show, we will always request 24 extra people to help with the unloading of the containers and the actual setup of the show,” he says.

O’Keeffe estimates that there are typically 30 people backstage on a performance night, and 30 to 40 people in an arena for the installation or tear-down process.

Additionally, some ice arenas differ in size, which can slightly alter the production of any given show. “When we play Radio City Music Hall, it is very small,” Vincent says. “And when we go to
Mexico, we play on a stage that’s probably half the size of a normal rink. We know that beforehand, though, so we actually cut the show down, change the choreography and the staging so that it fits the ice size. For the most part, we’re aware of our obstacles ahead of time so we can rehearse that and still put out a decent product.”

For each production company, the creation of an ice show concept is merely the beginning of a continuous path toward enhancing the eventual product. Ice shows materialize to possess an inexplicable element that by far surpasses the difficulty of the jumps performed, the beauty of the costumes, or the vibrancy of the colorful lighting schemes. They have something for every fan, as O’Keeffe says—something undeniably exciting. In the end, all of these fantastic elements come together to reflect and embody the sheer dedication of the inspired craftsmen and women who are behind the ice.