1: The Blues

Junior ice dance teams this season have the good fortune to have been assigned the blues as their requisite compulsory dance, the pattern upon which their season short dance is to be based. Much was made of the ISU's allowing hip-hop as a supplemental rhythm -- but that's for another post. Let's instead consider the blues itself.

The blues compulsory, like nearly half of all the compulsory dances, was created in Great Britain in the 1930s. Ice-Dance.com, with assistance from the ISU Handbook, provides a good technical breakdown of the pattern; more generally speaking, the dance was then and still is now about deep knees and deep, strong, long edges. And for as much as these elements are about the quality of blade movement, they're also about character -- the blues is a dance of passion, intensity, musicality, and connection, connection, connection.

A fine junior demonstration of the pattern (for seniors, the Midnight Blues supplanted the standard blues in 2001) comes from Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the 2005 Junior World Championships:


They certainly hit the edges and the knees, but it's the intro and conclusion that really put them over the top.

But what inspired the blues pattern in the first place? Only the floor dance to a very small extent; here's a sampling of movement found in real blues, original blues, as roughly concurrent with the compulsory's emergence:


A case could be made for the knee bends, but even that's being rather generous. However, what blues as a pattern does offer is more demand for close holds and connected full-body movement than do some other compulsories, those more concerned with the intricacies of footwork -- the technical focus here is the edgework, but it's packaged to require that challenging "something more" of a couple.

But while the blues compulsory has remained essentially static in its eight decades, blues dance has shifted considerably, seeing a particular resurgence in recent years as an effect of the trend for swing, and today's junior short dances haven't necessarily been created in a vacuum. For a few interesting points of technical reference, check out this demonstration of a fundamental step in contemporary blues dance, the lunge, from Portland blues dancers Dustin and Ally, as well as a take on the blues from dancers Campbell and Chris which makes a few nods to swing (and just a bit of Latin):


While ice dance by nature -- and the short dance in particular -- entails considerable technical requirements and restrictions, some choreographers and teams are doing their best to bring out some bluesy floor feeling and movement in the most allowable ways. Canadian junior silver medalist Madeline Edwards and ZhaoKai Pang's short dance, which placed third at JGP Courchevel, was a hit on the summer comp circuit, and for good reason. The skating is excellent, but watch the above-the-blade action. Here's a particularly sharp performance from August's BC/YT SummerSkate competition:



Next time: Hip-Hop. On. ICE; or, The ISU Watches So You Think You Can Dance.