Iced ballet

Figure skaters carve pirouettes into a frozen-over swan lake and Catherine Littlefield, dressed in mittens, a fur coat, and blanket, stands by. She’s watching intently and scribbling notes in preparation for her production of ballet-infused ice skating, It Happens on Ice.

Littlefield had been pushing ballet’s boundaries for years, but her two-act It Happens on Ice was out of the ordinary for pointe shoe purists in 1940.  After staging The Sleeping Beauty in 1937 – complete with 100 dancers and 85 musicians – she put dancers on bicycles in American Jubilee and her droll satire Ladies’ Better Dresses poked fun at America’s fashion industry.

It Happens on Ice was a commercial project for Littlefield while she took a hiatus from choreographing for American ballet companies. However, she applied the same enthusiasm to the winter spectacular as she did to her previous works. Littlefield was initially nervous about replacing dancers’ pointe shoes with ice skates in her staging of Swan Lake in the first act, and with good reason, too. She quickly realised that the combination of basic ballet steps and slippery ice could turn the dancers into a pile of fractures, dislocations and torn ligaments. Ballet positions would be lost in the whip-fast spins or, worse, enforcing the basic port de bras on an ice dancer mid-air would result in a crash landing. Littlefield made certain her dancers were conscious of elegant ballet lines, group composition, and able to adapt their spins into ballet turns and their jumps into long ballet leaps.

The second act in It Happens On Ice captured Littlefield’s knack for comedy. So What Goes, a riotous send-up about a day on the old skating pond, featured naughty boys tripping up sunny pig-tailed girls, gliding governesses and young lovers drawing a perfect figure eight. 

In his article about It Happens on Ice, Walter Terry of the New York Herald Tribune commented: “You will be convinced, I think, that Catherine Littlefield is becoming a theatre figure of the first rank, a girl who is leaving her mark in the revue, in the ballet, and on ice.” And he was right. Catherine Littlefield went on to become a pioneering force in American ballet, ice dancing, and was one of the first inductees into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance.

Image: Betty Aikinson makes a turn during the butterfly appearing in It Happens on Ice at the Radio City’s Center Theater, circa 1941