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Concentration camp ice dance by wife of Putin official causes uproar | |
(35 minutes later) | |
The wife of Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has caused controversy by dressing in a concentration camp uniform for a televised ice dance routine that some have called the “Holocaust on ice”. | |
Tatiana Navka, a former Olympic ice dancer and the wife of presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and her dancing partner, actor Andrei Burkovsky, appeared in striped uniforms bering yellow six-pointed stars on the popular celebrity skating TV show Ice Age. | |
Their routine for the song Beautiful That Way – by Israeli singer Achinoam “Noa” Nini – was based on the Academy-Award-winning Italian film Life Is Beautiful. | |
In the film, a Jewish father pretends for the sake of his young son that the family’s internment by the Nazis is part of an elaborate game. | |
In their performance, Navka and Burkovsky smiled and pantomimed shooting at each other in front of an imaginary child, before Burkovsky exited to the sound of machine gun fire. | |
“Definitely watch this! One of my favourite numbers!” Navka wrote under photographs from the performance on her Instagram account, adding that: “Our children should know and remember that terrible time.” | |
The judges gave the pair perfect scores for both technique and artistry, but the performance divided news outlets and social media users. | |
One suggested Navka and Burkovsky be sent to a place “where they give out those kind of pyjamas for free,” while another said they should have “starved for a few months, worked in the freezing cold to get into character”. | |
A popular tweet said the producers at state-owned Channel One, which broadcast the show, were “f**ked in the head”. | |
Dozens of others tweeted angry comments at the Twitter account of the Russian embassy in London. | Dozens of others tweeted angry comments at the Twitter account of the Russian embassy in London. |
A similar scandal unfolded in April when actor Alexander Petrov dressed as a Nazi soldier for a routine on the TV show Dancing With the Stars. Internet users at the time sarcastically suggested he do a number about the concentration camps. |