Sensuality and Ice Magic

By Gerald Clarke

The accents of affection change from country to country. In Britain and Australia, for instance, exuberant fans often throw them bouquets of flowers; at the end of one Australian performance, Jayne Torvill spent 20 minutes crisscrossing the ice to retrieve a garden of tributes. Americans tend to show their approval through body motion as well. So it was earlier this month, as Torvill, 29, and her skating partner, Christopher Dean, 28, ended the first show of their current U.S. tour, when some 10,000 people in Buffalo's Memorial Auditorium stood, cheered and clapped until their hands were chafed. "Well, kids," said a grateful member of their 16-person ice-dancing troupe, "we're in America!"

So they are and so they will be, touring 60 cities in four months with an international ensemble of young skaters. Combining the invention of the Broadway musical, the grace of ballet and the speed of steel sliding across a smooth surface, they are zestfully -- and often wittily -- redefining that tired old branch of show business, the ice revue.

By March, when they head home for Britain, T & D, as the English press calls them, will be as familiar to many Americans as AT&T. To those who watched the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, they already are. Scoring two perfect sixes, they won the gold medal and virtually reconstructed that curious hybrid -- half sport, half art -- called ice dancing.

Less gymnastic and acrobatic than pairs skating, ice dancing, which bears more than a passing resemblance to ballroom dancing, works its wonders within a smaller compass. It allows no high lifts, for example, and spins are limited to 1 1/2 turns. "The difference is like that between poetry and prose," says Dick Button, the American skating impresario and Olympic figure-skating star. "They are two different disciplines. Both can be beautiful."

Fellow Britons like Diane Towler and Bernard Ford helped pioneer the ice- dancing form during the '60s. "Because they have a long history of ballroom dancing," says Button, "the British have been the most creative of ice dancers. It strikes a sensitive nerve in them." Soviets like Ludmilla Pakhomova and Aleksandr Gorshkov have also left their imprint on the form, but Torvill and Dean may be the first to reach the superstar status of such figure-skating soloists as Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming. "All new skaters will in some way look like Torvill and Dean," says Button. "They are wonderfully creative. Much of what they do is unique to them."

Indeed, no other individual or duo has glided with such felicitous daring across frozen water. "It is the way they get from Point A to Point B," says Andris Toppe, their ballet master. "A lot of skaters will skate to A, do a little trick, then travel to B and do another trick. It's boring. But the way Jayne and Chris cover the distance is choreographed. You are never bored."

True enough, but there is something more to the T & D magic, and even when they remain at Point A, doing their little trick, it stands out: they are not really two dancers but one. When they move, as to Ravel's Bolero or Rimsky- Korsakov's A Song of India, they move as one, the way that A & R -- Astaire and Rogers -- do on the late show, exuding a sensuality that is more pronounced because it is subdued. "I've never felt sexy in my life," said one elderly woman in the Buffalo audience. "But they make me feel sexy!"

That aroma of musk prompts many to ask whether they are married or otherwise romantically entwined. Of course, given their closeness, a sexual union might be redundant, if not incestuous. "Our relationship is as you see it on the ice," says Dean."We don't spend nights together," Torvill teases. They do spend mornings, afternoons and evenings together, and they have, as best they could, since they first teamed up in 1975.

Both grew up in Nottingham, in England's Midlands, and came from families of modest means. His father was an electrician; her parents ran a candy shop. He became a policeman, she a secretary. But every free hour they were on the ice, practicing.

Freed from their jobs by a grant from the city of Nottingham, they practiced full time, winning the European and world championships in 1981 and 1982 and going on to dazzle the Olympic judges in 1984. "Although we didn't realize it at the time, the Olympics was the make-or-break for us," says Dean. "Our whole careers depended on it." They formed their own company and made their first tour in 1984, visiting several U.S. cities last spring.

Despite a fierce and single-minded ambition, they appear as relaxed off the ! ice as they do on it, joking with each other like affectionate old war buddies, which in a sense they are. "It is better to give than to receive, Jayne," Dean says, underlining the Jayne as he makes a coy reference to her fondness for receiving gifts, some of which he gives her himself. "Well," she says, only slightly defensively, "I like to give too."

Dean enjoys speed. After he had finished skating in Sarajevo, he persuaded the British bobsled team to spin him down the hairpins with them. In England he races a Porsche, and once he hitched a ride in a jet fighter, looping the loops with the Red Arrows, the Royal Air Force's aerial-acrobatics team.

They reckon they have another ten years left to skate before muscles and energy give out. Along the way, they plan to start a school for child skaters. At that point they may even have time for social lives. "We know people all over the world," laughs Dean, "but we have no friends." No friends -- only thousands of admirers clapping their hands nearly raw each night, for as long as T & D choose to lace up their skates.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/Buffalo