Le Patin Libre's elite skaters unleash the glide in Murmuration
At DanceHouse, Montreal choreographer Alexandre Hamel blends a love of birds and a background in competitive figure skating to create a dazzling new kind of ice show
Le Patin Libre’s Murmuration. Photo by Nora Houguenade
DanceHouse presents Le Patin Libre’s Murmuration with community partner Canada Ice Dance Theatre at Kerrisdale Cyclone Taylor Arena from March 20 to 23
LE PATIN LIBRE’s thrilling, genre-busting ice show Murmuration brings together two of its company founder’s lifelong obsessions: figure skating and the dazzling movement of flocks of birds.
The former pursuit took Montreal’s Alexandre Hamel from international competition to the glittery world of Disney on Ice. But in 2005, he started pushing beyond the athletic and commercial sides of the sport to express his own artful group work with Le Patin Libre, which literally—and metaphorically—translates as “free skate”. The troupe’s style blends the athletic virtuosity of skating with the energy of contemporary and street dance—a “body rush”, as one five-star Guardian review put it. Long gone are the compulsory figures and spangles of Hamel’s youth. “What I lived in figure skating in the past versus what I live now is absolutely new, and it’s a joy, it’s a liberation,” he states simply in a call with Stir.
The fascination with murmurations dates back to before Hamel laced on his first pair of skates, however. “I was obsessed with that since I was a kid,” the energized artist explains. “I remember as a kid, looking at those murmurations, like either starlings or pigeons in urban settings, and being absolutely obsessed by it. I also saw it in documentaries, with fish doing the same. I purposely made a trip to go swim with sardines—and this feeling of being part of that, it didn’t work! They just got away from me.
“And when I started to understand the mathematical functioning of those murmurations, of those flocks of birds and schools of fish, it started to be even more beautiful to me, a kind of image of togetherness and perfection—of nature creating the great system of Earth, really,” he enthuses.
Now, that passion finds its expression in the internationally lauded Murmuration, in which Hamel’s dancers fly as a group organism across a rink. Years—and uncountable hours studying birds outside and nature videos—in the making, the show finally hits Vancouver’s Kerrisdale Cyclone Taylor Arena, care of DanceHouse, this month.
Essentially, the movement built slowly as an algorithm, Hamel explains. “Birds follow each other, and they try not to touch the others, but they want to be near the others—so it’s a series of simple rules,” he explains. “But then we were able to just bend the things a little bit to bring the group in that corner of the ice, and then this one, and then slow it down or accelerate it.”
Alexandre Hamel.
At a certain point, though, Hamel’s elite, internationally recruited skaters also had to learn to let go of that mathematical operational logic, once it was mastered, and unleash the glide—sometimes in a blur of high speed.
The more Hamel has worked with Murmuration, the deeper he finds its meaning.
“What often happens is the group splits in two, and then you’re facing a problem about how to get the group together again,” the artist says. “And this idea is important in our times: How are we together? How do we split? Why? How can we get together again when we’re split into polarized groups? So the show goes beyond imitating birds and evolves into a reflection about togetherness, about war, about peace, about polarization.”
As audiences take in the mesmerizing configurations that shift and reverse, expand and contract across the ice, they may feel like they’re witnessing something entirely strange and new—completely removed from the more familiar world of sequins and Salchows. (It’s a sensation the video below only begins to describe.)
“For a spectator who is sitting quite far back in an ice rink, we take advantage of that a lot in the show,” Hamel says. “There’s something really profound and weird that happens: it’s not just arms and legs moving; there’s the whole body working through space.” 
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