Athletic Art
After a prolific ice dancing career, Shae-Lynn Bourne finds more joy in choreographing than competing
Shae-Lynn Bourne is a three-time Olympian ice dancer from Chatham, Ontario, who now works as a choreographer. The unexpected career change has led Bourne to find more joy within skating, now that she no longer competes.
If you ask Shae-Lynn Bourne how she feels about receiving the inaugural Skating Award for Best Choreographer from the International Skating Union (ISU), she’ll respond with characteristic modesty: “I’ve always had this little voice inside of me saying ‘How can you judge dance?’ In a way, you can’t. I feel this about every art. But being acknowledged and recognized was really wonderful, and I felt proud to just be in that category.”
The award, which Bourne received on July 11th, honours her work throughout the 2019/20 season, during which she choreographed for top skaters including America’s Nathan Chen, Russia’s Evgenia Medvedeva, and Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu. A threetime Olympian from Chatham, Ontario, Bourne is no stranger to the podium. Over the course of her decade-long competitive ice dancing career, she and Victor Kraatz, her skating partner, were ten-time Canadian Figure Skating Champions and three-time Four Continents Figure Skating Champions. In 2003, the pair capped their career by becoming the first North American ice dancers to win a World Championship.
While Bourne is humble about her recent nod from the ISU, she’s excited about the creation of the Skating Awards program overall. The prizes, she points out, honour not only the competitors who are the public face of the sport but also some of the many professionals who work behind the scenes to teach, train and support them. In addition to the Best Choreographer category, the awards also include Best Costume and Best Coach. “A huge team goes into any skater,” Bourne explains. “You have your main coach, the choreographer, the off-ice trainer, the physiotherapist, the costume designer and the music editor. You’re never alone, and I think what makes these awards wonderful is that they’re acknowledging all the creators and hard workers involved in the sport.”
In her early teens, Bourne initially competed in pairs skating, but a series of injuries led her to consider other options. When she was fifteen years old, a test skate with German-born Kraatz ignited a dynamic partnership that would see them through ten seasons and dozens of medals. Compared to pairs skating, ice dancing has fewer required elements – like the jumps, spins, and other athletic feats that competitive skaters need to include in their programs – and afforded more creative freedom.
Although technical precision was still crucial, performance was equally important. To Bourne, it seemed like “athletic art.” “Everything from beginning to end needed to be original and creative and musical. It’s bringing that dance and story or concept to life on the ice and at the same time getting those points with the lifts and certain elements that are required. It’s the whole package. You really have to be well-rounded,” she says.
Bourne thrived in this new discipline and in her partnership with Kraatz. With the leeway to let their imaginations soar, they pioneered techniques like hydroblading, where skaters glide with their bodies stretched so low they’re almost skimming the surface of the ice. When the pair retired from competition at the end of the 2002/03 season, Bourne was looking forward to skating just for the joy of entertaining. She and Kraatz had intended to tour together, but she was taken by surprise when he told her he was leaving the sport. “Once that last Worlds was done, I felt like the weights came off. I got through that part, and now it was a chance to create. I must say that when Victor quit, it was a hard time in my life. It wasn’t the plan,” Bourne says. She could perform solo, but the public was enamoured with Bourne and Kraatz – would they be interested in watching Bourne skate alone?
Deciding she was unwilling to sacrifice her performance dreams without at least giving them a shot, she began performing on her own. She and Kraatz had developed their competitive programs in partnership with choreographers and coaches, using each program for a full season. Now, skating solo and needing several performance pieces every year, Bourne found it more convenient to choreograph for herself.
Not only did audiences love Bourne’s new work, her performances caught the eyes of other skaters too. Soon, Canadian skater Joannie Rochette approached Bourne to choreograph for her. Their collaboration was so fruitful that Rochette returned to Bourne year after year, and Bourne ultimately choreographed the short program that won Rochette the bronze medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.
“It was a beautiful beginning,” Bourne says while reminiscing. After that, opportunities to choreograph continued coming her way. “Once you show your work, it’s word of mouth. People see, and more skaters ask. It took me down a path that I didn’t necessarily plan for or expect, but I’ve really loved it ever since.” Today, Bourne choreographs show pieces, group numbers and competitive programs. Although her own competitive career was in ice dancing, most of her choreographies are for single skaters who look to her to inject musicality and artistry into their routines.
Bourne’s choreographic process begins with a conversation. “I always want to know: What do you want to say to the world? What do you want to share? I want to bring out, as much as possible, the voice of the person that’s on the ice,” she says. She then spends hours poring over music in search of the perfect song, which she thinks is the hardest part of the job.
“I make a playlist that could be up to a hundred songs. In competition, there’s so much stress. Music can be the one thing that settles you a little bit. If you love it, you’re going to be more present,” she says.
After watching videos of a skater’s previous programs to get a sense of how they move, Bourne begins developing the choreography on her own, but progress begins in earnest only when she works one-on-one with the skater for a week. The choreography inevitably changes as she watches them try out her ideas. “How I do it and how they do it will be very different because every body is different, every personality is different,” she says. “It can take up to three hours just to make that opening pose and first twenty seconds sometimes, because it needs to be right.”
Bourne’s collaborative approach to choreography is inspired by coaches and choreographers she worked with during her own competitive turn, especially Uschi Keszler. “She had such a different way of looking at the world and the ice and how to move, and she gave us a lot of freedom,” Bourne says. “She would put ideas in our minds and give us tools but then let us kind of play. … It’s like being a child, in a way – letting your imagination soar and giving yourself the time and the space to create.”
Constructing a story to undergird the performance is also fundamental to Bourne’s choreographic style. When the skater has a specific image or scenario to imagine while they perform, she finds it brings out a much more genuine emotional expression. Her husband, Bohdan Turok, a psychotherapistturned-filmmaker, has also become an integral part of her process, providing input on story development, music selection and movement.
The goal is to create a program that resonates with the audience, stirs their emotions and stays with them long after they leave the arena. Bourne says that after a week of working with a skater, when they show her the first, rough skate-through of their new program, she can often sense the emotional impact it will have on an audience. “I’ll tell them if this is trained well, and they’re ready, and they’re prepared, and they’re present, people will stand, people will cry. I prepare them for that because I want them to understand how moving it can be,” she says. “It’s so hard in the singles event to allow yourself to let go, be free and entertain because you also need to land these difficult jumps. But once you have that moment, then you know. Once you have a taste of it, you don’t want to do anything less.”
Bourne’s life, like everyone’s, has looked a bit different this year. For the first time since 2003, she couldn’t spend the month of August in Japan rehearsing, choreographing and performing in Friends on Ice, a show produced by Japanese Olympic champion Shizuka Arakawa. She has, however, been able to continue to choreograph, FaceTiming skaters around the world from her garage in Laguna Beach, California, and, once lockdown lifted, occasionally meeting local skaters in person at private arenas.
Although choreography was an unexpected course change for Bourne, she wouldn’t have it any other way. “We can have plans, but sometimes they shift and sometimes life gets better. What you think might not be good, in the end can be. I needed to compete to be able to do what I do now, but I fell more in love with skating as a choreographer and performer once I was out of the competitive setting.”