The Ice hotel at Jukkasjärvi in Lapland, northern Sweden, home of Santa Claus, has become a legend in its 13-year lifetime. Built of 4,000 tonnes of ice ‘borrowed’ from the adjacent Torne river and 30,000 tonnes of snow, it melts every spring and is reborn in the autumn.

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Highlights include 25 designer ice suites in which ice beds softened by reindeer hides are surrounded by uplit ice sculptures. The temperature, whether it’s minus 5 or minus 35 degrees outside, remains at a fairly constant minus 5 inside.

The stunning effect is made more intense still by the enfolding silence, any sound muffled by the rough ice walls and soft snow underfoot.

Take a walk outside after a long day’s sleigh riding, snowmobiling and cross-country skiing to take in the Northern Lights’ shimmering beauty, and you can see why it’s become one of the hippest – not to say coldest – adventure holiday destinations in the world.

This year, visitors found themselves with another remarkable ice building to savour. Inspired by Swedish actor and former theater manager Rolf Degerlund, a full scale replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London has been built between the hotel and the frozen river – in ice.

The London version may have taken Sam Wanamaker 27 years to bring to life, but at Jukkasjärvi, with just three months of commercial activity at the hotel available, between the end of construction and the arrival of spring warmth, the theater rose from virgin snow to completion last autumn, and saw its first production – Hamlet, performed in Saami, the language of Lapland – in January.

TTS Scandinavia, appointed last autumn as Swedish distributors for Renkus-Heinz were asked to provide the sound technology for this subzero, open-air theater. Temperatures through the winter months drop as low as –40C, and audiences are outfitted with serious snow suits, so this was not going to be a regular
project.

Like the original and the London replica, the 500-capacity Ice Globe is in-the-round, with a
half-circle of audience tiers facing the proscenium stage and open to the skies. Above and behind them, the outer wall of the theater has ring of roofed seating boxes.

The whole edifice, with a beautifully carved façade mimicking the Elizabethan timbers of the Globe and adorned with a stylish line embossing of Shakespeare’s face, is built almost entirely of snow and ice. The few concessions to modern materials are of course technology and safety related: the proscenium arch stage is roofed and conceals steel supports from which a lighting grid flown from four parallel trusses.

The audio requirement was simple enough in delivery terms – a versatile system to handle the spoken word (Hamlet et al) and a wide variety of musical performances. Intelligibility, musicality and enough power from a small system, and the ability for it to perform flawlessly at very low temperatures, were the design requirements.

Theater manager Rolf Degerlund

Rolf Degerlund, is manager and artistic director of the Ice Globe, and he explains how it came to fruition. “I was a theater manager for 13 years, then went back to acting in TV and movies, and I followed the rebuilding of the Globe in London. One day, on a plane back to Sweden in 1997, I was dreaming about it and I thought, one day I want to see actors saying lines from Shakespeare with steam coming from their mouths. Maybe we could do an Ice Globe? So when I got home I did a painting of this dream. In November 2001 I had to make a speech in big meeting about arts in Europe and I took the painting with me. I showed the audience the painting and told them of my dream to be the first ice theater manager in the world. When I left the stage, a man came up and introduced himself as the president of Ice hotel Jukkasjärvi, and said ‘I will build your Ice Globe for you’.
Despite the cold, Ice Globe functions in the same way as an ordinary theater: “Except we’re outside and it can be minus eight and sometimes minus 35. The colder the better.” The reaction of artists when they’re first approached to perform at the Ice Globe is initial incomprehension: ‘So the audience are in the cold; but is it warm on the stage?’ ‘No, it’s minus 35.’

Arja Saijonmaa sings Mikis Theodorakis

Then the telephone and see the theater, they understand…it’s all outside! It’s a big thing for them to stand there and look out on the ice boxes under the stars.”

Shakespeare on ice: the open air Ice Globe

Degerlund says the high technology is essential: “You must have good sound for this standard of performers. We have very good sound from Renkus-Heinz.” The main left and right proscenium system comprises a pair each of STX7 and STX5L cabinets, while a centre pair of STX2 and six Reflex RFX121 full-range loudspeakers – two installed at the rear atop the perimeter wall for surround sound and four as stage monitors – complete the system. In normal use the front speakers are covered by white cloth to blend in with the ice. It’s all powered by Renkus-Heinz P3500 and P2950 amplifiers Theodorakis and controlled by a D26 loudspeaker processor. The microphones consist of Shure UHF Mark 2 wireless systems, mixed on a Soundcraft Spirit 324 digital console.

Unexpectedly, the theater’s acoustics are remarkably good. Freshly fallen snow covers a large proportion of the ice blocks’ surfaces, softening reverberation to a pleasant but still ‘live’ level.

The installation itself is also unique, with the left-and-right loudspeaker arrays recessed into the ice wall to either side of the stage and the amplifier rack housed in an ice ‘cupboard’ in the side of the backstage artists’ entrance tunnel.

Sten Nyhlen is sound operator at the Ice Globe and, in conjunction with TTS and Renkus-Heinz, designed the audio system. With previous experience of low-temperature installations, he comments that the unique installation required a degree of careful thinking at the design stage.

“The conditions and materials are very unusual for a theater sound system, but they figured out how to make it work. At minus 35 there is no problem with the sound system, just some frost on the loudspeakers, but there are certain special things we have to do to make sure it keeps working.”

According to Anders Lindstedt of TTS Scandinavia, these ‘special things’ include running the system 24 hours a day with audio to prevent the loudspeaker drivers freezing. Similarly, the Shure wireless systems perform perfectly in the cold but the crucial aspect is keeping the batteries warm – belt packs must be worn very close to the body, and the receivers must also be powered up 24 hours a day.

“It’s only a few weeks into our first season,” adds Degerlund, “but on our opening night there were 200 members of the international press and the media attention has been intense ever since. Artists are realizing what a special and exciting theater this is to play.”