In the Pool, a Thing of Beauty

Head choreographer Stephan Miermont keeps watch over the U.S. synchronized swimmers. "I love to create emotions," he says. "I love to make people cry." (By Jonathan Newton -- The Washington Post)
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U.S. Coach Tammy McGregor says the Israeli coach told her "it is so nice, so refreshing to see someone do something so new and creative."

Creativity is not a beloved trait in synchronized swimming. Innovation usually comes when one country sees another doing something, makes tiny tweaks, then unveils a performance that it claims as its own. Nothing is truly original. Nobody takes chances. McGregor compares it to fashion, saying all the stores are selling capri pants and maybe one distinguishes itself from the others by adding lace to the trim. Otherwise nobody's capris look different from anybody else's.

"This is completely different," she adds.

The women swimming Miermont's routine say it is dangerous, not from the standpoint of injury, but because the maneuvers don't always work right. It is so complex, so intricate that mistakes will be made. Elements that are supposed to work perfectly won't every time. "You don't want that in synchronized swimming," says Kim Probst, a co-captain of the U.S. team, emphasizing the obvious.

And yet this imperfection is also the brilliance of the routine. McGregor, who demands perfection from every movement, says she misses the mistakes when watching Miermont's routine, finding herself caught up in the overall performance, waiting for the next piece of the story to come. "And I see it every day," she says. "I know what's coming."

The ultimate test, she says, is that her male friends who have seen the routine love it, vividly recalling details of it days later. This is promising, she believes, "since men never pay attention to any details."

Then again this is why she hired Miermont away from his life in Las Vegas, where he helped design "O," the Cirque du Soleil's aquatic show at the Bellagio hotel. She wanted unique. The Americans are never going to be as technically perfect as the Russians. The team will never be made up of women exactly 5 feet 6 with the ideal arm length. If the United States was going to seize an advantage, it needed to create the most innovative routine imaginable.

Which apparently Miermont, 40, has done. As in a kaleidoscope, the groups of American swimmers will be ever evolving, each piece moving into another rather than breaking up to begin a new story.

No nation has tried anything like this. But Miermont has little use for the way synchronized swimming is currently performed. He is tired of the shows every country puts on. His performance was going to have to be abstract, unique, overwhelming to the eye.

Two years ago, at the FINA World Trophy Cup, he tried something that broke from the regular mode of an entire team moving as one and the United States won, beating Russia, which hadn't happened in years. Emboldened by this result, he pushed for a performance even grander that would shatter every expectation.

He found it one day last summer while watching the Swiss Bejart Ballet perform in his native Saint-Etienne, France. In one of the dances, the theater suddenly went dark, and the dancers padded around the floor in a pantomime of a frantic search for light. Shrouded in blackness, the audience was forced to listen, imagining the dancers' movements somewhere in the gloom. At the end a light appeared in the ceiling, beaming down on the stage floor. Light had been found. And Miermont was entranced.

Light. He could do something with light. He plunged into days of research, reading books on light and scouring the Internet. He studied the first few pages of the Bible, hunting for hidden meanings in the story of Creation. Then he molded this vision into a narrative, ultimately shaping a story so complex he is certain most of the people watching will not understand. He told each swimmer her role, her place in the story so she could grasp his vision and perform with the required emotion.