Kawahara Selected for PSA Hall of Fame B Y K E N T MC D I L L
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he Professional Skaters Association Hall of Fame celebrates the achievements of storied and successful coaches, most of whom have taken individual and pair skaters to championship levels of figure skating prowess. Sarah Kawahara is in the PSA Hall of Fame primarily for her skill at getting dozens, sometimes hundreds, of skaters to perform well enough to present a full-blown story, often with a beginning, a middle, and an end. One of the most renowned and celebrated figure skating choreographers in history, Kawahara is the 2019 inductee into the PSA Hall of Fame. “It is just amazing,” Kawahara told PS Magazine. “I’m just so tremendously honored. I never dreamed my career would take me here. My only regret is that I cannot share it with my dad (Hideo Kawahara, who passed
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away in 2011), who helped me get here, who was instrumental in training me, coaching me, to make me who I have become.” Kawahara’s career as a choreographer has been saluted by organizations outside of the realm of figure skating. She won an Emmy Award for the choreography in the television show Scott Hamilton Upside Down in 1996, and was again awarded by the Emmys for her work on the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Filmgoers are very familiar with Kawahara’s work probably without knowing her name. She was the choreographer for the Will Ferrell film Blades of Glory and served the same role for the widely praised biopic I, Tonya. She has just completed work on a Netflix film entitled Spinning Out. But Kawahara’s career started as a
choreographer for individual competitors, and had a long-standing professional relationship with Hamilton, which led to the first Emmy award. Over the years, she choreographed professional shows that included for Hamilton, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Robin Cousins, Nancy Kerrigan, Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, and Oksana Baiul. Kawahara sees much of her work as one about storytelling, which goes a long way toward understanding how she approaches coaching groups for performance differently than when she has coached individuals for competition. “When you are working with a group of people, it is a symphony,” she said. “Everybody, each person is responsible for their own instrument, and the proficiency for how they play their instrument adds to the sound, the look, the emotion of the piece. They are skating together in a symphony. For me, I am the conductor. When I am doing production work, like with Disney or any live production. That is essentially my approach. “When I work with one person, the demand is the same, except I am working with one person. The play I
