Category: Uncategorized

Not long ago, I became obsessed with “Yuri!!! On Ice,” a 12-episode anime series about male figure skaters. Like [Jason] Brown himself, the show saw no exact category for what it wanted to be and so created its own. It focuses on the triangle of Yuri, a middle-of-the-pack Japanese figure skater who can’t reliably land quads; his 15-year-old Russian competitor Yurio, who hits multiple quads with ease; and their coach, the resplendent technical wizard Victor. Yuri pines after Victor, and the force of his adoration is so great that it propels him all the way to the Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final, an actual event.

None of this fully explains how hypnotic the show is. It presents male figure skating in all its queerness, its hopefulness, its utopianism. Neon streams between the buildings; swish swish go the blades across the soundtrack; snow falls steadily, like tributes the sky tosses to the ground. “Yes, we were born to make history,” the theme song insists.

There is something particular about where the mind goes when you watch skating. It glides along with the action. The turns happen inside the head, the jumps float right up to the top of the skull. You are alone in a spotlight. Part of the genius of “Yuri!!! On Ice” is to present Yuri’s skates as interior monologues made physical, just as Brown described his own to me in an email: “I tend to talk to myself and my body during my programs, which sounds sort of crazy.” Yuri is working something out. When he breaks through, when he defeats the flinchings and hesitations of his body and brings it into full collaboration with his desires, he is declaring love. Yuri’s animated figure moves into a smooth, spinning blur, and I am reminded of what Agnes de Mille wrote in “Dance to the Piper” about ballet: It “represents the body as we wish it were, not one of our bodies well used, but a dream body liberated from trouble.”

The dream body moves through a universe where someone who skates with tenderness and vulnerability can stand on the podium next to a peerless technician who represents the new future of skating. This is not strict realism, no. But that is what’s so touching about it: Here is someone determined to impose his imagination on a crueler and more hostile reality. Here is a snow globe with its own sky, and if you want to join us inside, you’re welcome.