If Cirque du Soleil forgets the way back to Prince George, Andy Buchanan can point the way.
The internationally pedigreed athlete lived in northern B.C. for a time in the 1990s, before ending up on some of the world's top figure skating tours and eventually in the cast of the first ever acro-skating circus show Crystal.
"I was coaching in Prince Rupert while I was going to college," Buchanan told The Citizen.
He hit the ice road in 1999 and has never really stopped since. His first professional cast was with Disney On Ice where he encountered an old friend from their days training in Edmonton. Soon he and Robin Johnstone were performing as husband and wife. They caught on as a pair in the British TV show Dancing On Ice, then travelled with the Holiday On Ice cast in Europe, and the credits stacked up as fast as the miles.
Both are in the inaugural cast of Crystal.
"We've been waiting for this. The skating world has heard rumours for years. We jumped on it. We put the word in through every channel we had," Buchanan said.
"The biggest draw for us is being part of a first. It's a dream come true. For most people, if you could somehow get tickets to any show - Broadway, figure skating, concert, almost anything - for a lot of people all over the world it would be a Cirque show. And now they have done that thing that they do for ice."
It took years to create this icebreaking show. There is a story to it - the tale of a teenaged girl who falls through the ice and has a series of underwater visions, flashes of her possible future, if she can summon the will to get back to the surface. After the narrative was written came all the epic Cirque du Soleil elements of sets and costumes, acrobatics and human mechanics.
For the first time in the history of the Canadian performance company known in all corners of the globe, they incorporated ice into the equation.
"We are not known in the community (of ice sports) for this," said Stacy Clark, head of acrobatic casting. "We have a very specific kind of need for skill set and personal attributes, and we don't have any kind of history or reputation in this field. Where we enjoy these amazing relationships with gymnastic federations and circus schools and sporting associations - we have almost 34 years of favour, now, building those relationships - we are going at it again with nothing in the skating world. We are just in the building block stage."
Clark and the Cirque casting department scouted and communicated with every domain they could think of that touched on ice-based athletes. The outreach turned into auditions, the auditions turned into short-lists, and then came the training.
When Cirque floated the idea of a water-centric show (the massive performance hit O permanently stationed in Las Vegas), they called in Canadian synchronized swimming superstar Sylvie Frchette. Her input proved invaluable in the casting and creative processes.
Learning from this success, Cirque called upon figure skating superstars Kurt Browning and Benjamin Agosto as key design and casting consultants for Crystal.
Eighteen of the Crystal cast members had to be from the ice athletics world as their primary background. The other 22 in the show were from an acrobatic and circus arts background. Once they were identified, the Cirque training department went to work crossing them over into each other's skill-sets.
"You have such big hockey fans in P.G. so they'll know some of these guys. Three of our performers are from Red Bull Crashed Ice, so they are amazing, going off the ramps, but you've also got the figure skating talent. They have integrated everyone flawlessly," said Buchanan.
Some of the athletes are stars in their field. The cast is not part of the marketing of this or any other Cirque show, however.
"That's the big thing that Cirque's always been known for, that it's Cirque du Soleil that's the star," said Clark.
