Last June, Joe Johnson experienced a panic that he likened to
Kill Bill sirens going off in his head.
"Oh, no, we're so not ready!" he thought.
But after a moment, he realized he and performing partner Karina Manta didn't have to get ready for a competitive figure skating season.
In April, Manta and Johnson put aside figure skating to literally join the circus – Cirque du Soleil's AXEL, which has an electrifying on-ice component.
"I'd been on that [skating] clock for like nine years, and so suddenly it was June and I was like, 'We don't have a rhythm dance!'" Johnson said.
"And then like, 'We don't need a rhythm dance!'" Manta chimed in, laughing. "'We have no key points to worry about!'"
"That rocked, actually," Johnson said.
Once they learned to de-program their internal figure skating season clocks, the transition to the professional world was a smooth one, and one they've both enjoyed immensely.
"It's just been a different way to experience something that you love," Johnson said. "And you get to learn all these new skills, and everybody around you is there for a reason and is so excited to share their talent with you. They're just the most wonderful people as far as a workplace goes. It's really given me a new perspective on how to approach athleticism."
The tour has been shut down since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but even in quarantine the performers have stayed in touch.
"Karina and I have been doing these group Facebook calls with six or seven of these people at a time, and we do this big stretch class with a bunch of these people who are aerialists and swing artists and jugglers," Johnson said. "And the community, the family that we have there is so amazing."
Working with performers with such a wide variety of talents has only helped their skating. Without having to work within the confines of rules and required elements in competition, Manta and Johnson have been able to experiment and broaden their skills.
"In competition you're limited in terms of certain elements," Manta said. "You can only do so many lifts. You can only do certain types of lifts. You have to have x-number of step sequences. And in the professional world, there's a lot more freedom.
"We were working with an Adagio pair team, and the pair teams on cast with us, and they were teaching us some of their stuff. And we all give each other little bits of everything that we do, and it's fun to get to explore these things that maybe we wouldn't have had a chance to do. Some of our lifts in our show number would not have been legal in competition. So it's fun to show that other side of our skating that competition restricts."
"You can literally be like, 'Oh, my shoulder hurts.' You can literally just go out and do a different lift," Johnson said, laughing. "You can just do a different lift! And I was like, 'Is this OK?'"
It also took some adjusting to get used to performing seven shows a week, rather than focusing on perfection in a handful of competitions per year.
"I'm so competitive. So it took some adjustment to be like, this is about something besides just getting the most points," Manta said. "It's about, 'how do I put on a great performance for these people every night of the week?' That was hard. It's a challenge to go out there and do a really physically challenging number of programs.
"Where in competition, the challenge is, 'OK, how do I get this perfect performance out maybe six times a year?' In the professional [show] world, it's 'how do I maintain the stamina to keep putting out phenomenal performances for these crowds that are paying a lot of money to see me? How do I keep that up for hundreds of shows?"
With shows canceled for the unforeseeable future, the two are quarantining separately – apart since March, this is the longest they've been apart since pairing up in 2014.
The time allows Manta to work on a manuscript about her journey as a skater and queer athlete. She sold her book rights after her essay "I Can't Hate My Body If I Love Hers" appeared in the New York Times' Modern Love College Essay Contest last year.
When Manta came out as bisexual in September 2018, she and Johnson became the first out ice dance team. They followed that up with their first Grand Prix assignment, finishing 10th at Skate America®, and placed seventh at the 2019 GEICO U.S. Figure Skating Championships, where their free dance to "Sweet Dreams" got a standing ovation and scored a personal best.
When U.S. Figure Skating posted their
"Sweet Dreams" performance to kick off 2019's Pride Month, it generated over 11.7 million views on Facebook to become the top-watched U.S. Figure Skating video of the entire year.
"At least in my experience, everybody's been extremely supportive of all of it," Johnson said. "And I think we're excited to see it, that for the most part people received this well. We got a very good score for us that year in a program that we were worried wouldn't be received well, and people were so kind to us. It was just really nice to feel like we were portraying a storyline that wasn't a straight narrative that was received so well. Because it was kind of a shift for us, and we were happy that people were nice about it."
Embracing their queer identities was also important.
"It was integral to our work," Manta said. "We chose to do a program that wasn't a love story for every dance that season, and we chose to have a vogueing step sequence. The queer community is not a monolith, and I don't think everybody will say, 'My queer identity is integral to other aspects of our work,' but for us, it really was. And so it was nice to be able to incorporate that."
Manta and Johnson have become trailblazers for an athletic community that still adheres fairly strictly to traditional gender norms.
But by creating their own path – joining the circus included – they hope to show the younger generations of figure skaters that they can be authentically themselves and still be successful.
"When you lose the blueprint of who you think you have to be, you can have such a creative existence, which is so cool," Manta said. "Especially artists, in skating and just as human beings. We're not in competitive skating anymore, but we're still artists, and I think when you can embrace that creativity in your own life, of, 'OK, what am I going to do with this that I maybe don't have a blueprint for?' that can be really exciting. It can be scary, but it can also be very exciting."
