Japanese figure skater and two-time Olympic champion, Yuzuru Hanyu, has produced four ice shows in the course of his career. The first one, titled Continues with Wings, was held in April2018 at the Musashino Forest Sport Plaza in Tokyo. It was a special three-day event to celebrate his back-to-back wins at the 2014 and 2018 Winter Olympics and pay tribute to the skaters who had supported and influenced him.
In 2022, Hanyu launched his professional skating career and became the first figure skater to produce a solo ice show, with no other guest skaters in the line-up. His first solo show Prologue was held in November at the Pia Arena MM in Yokohama and December at the Flat Hachinohe, lasting 90 minutes with skating at the athletic level of competition programs. The show was directed in collaboration with Japanese choreographer Mikiko. The broadcast of the Hachinohe show on CS TV Asahi won the Grand Prize in the category "best relay broadcast" at the 13th .
His second solo show Gift, presented in February2023, was the first skating event to be held at Tokyo Dome, one of Japan's largest and most prestigious entertainment venues, in front of a record ice show audience of 35,000 spectators. Hanyu performed a total of 12 programs in a span of 150 minutes, another record, accompanied by the dance group Elevenplay, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and a live band lead by Satoshi Takebe. On July 14, 2023, the show was distributed worldwide on the subscription channel Disney+. The Repray Tour, a sequel to Gift, is scheduled with three stops across Japan from November 2023 to February 2024, produced and directed by Hanyu and Mikiko. It marks the first solo show tour production in figure skating.
In March 2023, a special commemoration event of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami with the title Yuzuru Hanyu Notte Stellata was held at the Sekisui Heim Super Arena in Rifu, Miyagi, featuring a cast of international professional skaters as well as three-time Olympic gymnastics champion Kohei Uchimura, merging the sports of figure skating and artistic gymnastics to a new performing art genre.
Continues with Wings 2018
was Yuzuru Hanyu's first self-produced ice show, organized in collaboration with CIC Co., Ltd. and TV Asahi, and was held at the Musashino Forest Sport Plaza in Chōfu, Tokyo, on April13–15, 2018. It was a one-off event to celebrate Hanyu's win of back-to-back Olympic titles in 2014 and 2018, and to express his gratitude to fans and skaters who had inspired and supported him in the course of his career.
The show lasted 2.5 hours and was directed by Hanyu, featuring a mix of exhibition programs as well as multiple talk rounds between Hanyu and the invited skaters. Each guest was introduced with a personal video message by Hanyu. Due to his recuperation from an ankle injury, he was not initially scheduled to perform. However, at the end of the show, he gave a surprise performance with a medley of past competition programs, skipping jump elements due to the injury. The show finale was arranged by Hanyu's former choreographers Jeffrey Buttle and Shae-Lynn Bourne to the song "Time to Say Goodbye", performed by the full cast.
Besides Buttle and Bourne, the cast featured Hanyu's skating idols Evgeni Plushenko and Johnny Weir, five-time Japanese national champion Minoru Sano who had introduced Hanyu and his sister to figure skating, and Hanyu's former training mate Takahito Mura who helped him to master the triple Axel jump, which later became one of Hanyu's signature elements. Eventually, the cast included two-time European champions in pair skating, Alexander Smirnov and Yuko Kavaguti, whose move from Japan to Russia encouraged Hanyu to challenge a skating career abroad as well, moving from Sendai to Toronto, Canada, in 2012. Like Hanyu, Sano and Kavaguti were both trained by Japanese coach . The two-time World champions Stéphane Lambiel and Javier Fernández were not able to attend the event in person, but sent video messages to Hanyu that were shown on screen in the arena.
The venue was sold out on all three days of the show, with a capacity of 9,000 seats and ticket prices ranging from 6,000 to 18,000 yen ($57–171 as of 2018). The last day was screened live in 66 movie theaters nationwide and aired live on the Japanese subscription channel CS TV Asahi. On May6, 2022, Continues with Wings was rebroadcast on the channel as part of the program special "Golden Week Figure Skating". The event was sponsored by the cleaning and skin care company P&G as well as the Japanese airline ANA among others.