Since 1994, ice – at least the artificial, skating rink type of ice – has been enjoying its share of ghouls, zombies, bats and black cat action every October when it’s time for Halloween on Ice, a figure-skating spectacle dreamed up by skater Nancy Kerrigan.
The show has been performed live every year since 1994, and on (US) television most years. Then in 2004, director Meg Streeter Lauck produced a DVD of the performance, starring Kerrigan and Todd Eldredge (US figure skater, 1996 World Champion and a six-time national champion). Of course, it’s for sale on Amazon if you wish.
Kerrigan, a two-time Olympic Medalist (1992, 1994), says she came up with the idea so there would be a costume and creativity challenge for figure skaters each fall, according to an interview on the Best of Halloween on Ice DVD:
We thought we should get some kind of skating show that we’d be able to perform year after year after year, that would be great for the performers and great for the audience …. [Halloween on Ice] really challenges the skaters to come up new styles of skating, new kinds of costumes. It challenges them to come up with something they’ve never done before.
The nine-minute interview can be played by heading over here.
And! Since “Halloween on Ice” is a phrase, not a brand name, it turns out that this very night, probably right now, there is an annual Halloween on Ice event at a fun park in Italy. “Halloween at Gardaland is a series of Halloween-themed weekends bringing some spooky fun to Italy’s main theme park in Castelnuovo del Garda [near Verona]. Shows take place against a background of flying pumpkins, hanging skeletons and scary ghosts,” the event’s site explains.
The skating is fun to watch. Not particularly spooky for adults, but maybe inspiring for anyone who’s still planning their make-up for Halloween tonight.
Here’s a (somewhat low-res) segment from the 2008 ice show in Gardaland:
Back on the North American continent with the Kerrigan show, Kurt Browning does The Monster Mash in this segment:
Or how about this 1995 vid of Sergei Ponomorenko and Marina Klimova skating a Dracula scene (a bit of commentator chat overtop but not enough to distract from this highly choreographed approach to the palest, most vulnerable neck that Dracula desires):
If only the ice lived long enough to tell the tales. Or we could gather a torch-bearing posse and attempt to find an ice-ghost hunter and translator ….
meg walker 