Do it subtly, do it skillfully, and do it in Spanish.
Watch closely as Maia and Alex Shibutani execute their first twizzle set starting at about 2:36 (embed should begin at the designated time) -- and count along with Perez Prado:
Why does this work? Because it's intricately interwoven with their skill at the element; a fail on the twizzles is a fail for the fun gambit. Sufficiently believing that they can execute is also a bold acknowledgment of their ability on something with which many another team has struggled. (In its sensitive timing, it's not unlike the twizzle passage in Virtue and Moir's Carmen, which required a to-the-millisecond finish to work dramatically -- one they consistently nailed.)
Far from a cheap trick to illustrate a lyric, this is clever play with high-level difficulty, and a great show of confidence.
Not content to remain relics of broader Step Sequences lessons in Latin, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir have unveiled a classic rock-scored r(h)umba short dance that neatly condenses a Dancesport syllabus including samba, cha cha, and rumba into one sub-three-minute program:
Let's begin.
There's far too much to fully unpack in the opening "Sympathy for the Devil" sequence, but a few highlights -- and hybridized transitions -- are worth noting. The rhythm bounce is a good baseline for understanding the flair injected throughout the dance's up-tempo bookending sections. Consider a bit of batucada to open, a moment at 0:42-0:43 that reads a little bit samba lock, a little bit plait. But at 0:44-0:48, meet the most obvious callback to floor samba: the natural roll. It's been utilized on ice more than once, but rarely in its face-to-face variant and for so extensive a time. It leads into the promenade run up to 0:52.
In their no-touch step sequence, a required stop beginning at 1:08 is really a sort of Cuban break/demonstration of great Latin posture, which swiftly segues into a modified criss-cross bota fogo followed at 1:13 by a tip of the hat to the solo spot voltas -- it is, in general, difficult to explicitly associate the program's myriad turning moments with specifically codified Latin turns, but there's a styling to the movement that at least presents a reasonable facsimile here; they are clearly skating turns for a Latin ballroom program, not for a hip hop or a waltz or a quickstep.
Given the packed and heavily mandated nature of the r(h)umba sequence set to "Hotel California" -- featuring a compulsory pattern and partial step sequence -- it's challenging to point to many specific rumba steps aside from, for example, the opening out at 2:13 or a skating-friendly twist on rope spinning at 2:09. However, a review of the syllabus and this showdance -- and therefore trick-friendly -- rumba do underline Virtue and Moir's easy and excellent hip action and include a few familiar transitions:
The final sequence to "Oye Como Va" presents a quick nod to cha cha, noted in something like the fan at 3:11. As conscientious an effort at translating floor movement to ice this program may be, it also shouldn't be mistaken for a purist exercise in Latin ballroom -- nor need it be. For teams with the skill, the restrictions of a technical ice dance program and the freedom to play across textbook styles is not cause to blame a genre, but opportunity to cleverly -- and masterfully -- adapt.
Back at the outset of the 2015-16 season, Step Sequences devoted some space to the newly-coined matter of choreoliteralism: moments of choreography that literally depict song lyrics. This concept could be further expanded to include forms of choreographic pantomime based on theme rather than vocals, such as the telephone calls and rope-skipping depicted in the 2016-17 programs of world champion Evgenia Medvedeva, though for purposes of simplicity, we'll continue to reserve the term for a less narrative-based literalism.
We did not outline last season's strikes in the choreoliteral vein, but those that did appear were also mostly less overt than those on offer in the previous year. However, the summer competitions have already revealed one program that presents multiple demonstrations: this "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" / "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" free dance from Dubreuil/Lauzon team Olivia Smart and Adrià Díaz:
When watching, consider these keywords:
man
train
load
looking out
As the season unfolds, we'll add any further acts of choreoliteralism to this post.
Ice dance began its life as "hand-in-hand skating," something separate from the "combined" skating also en vogue around the turn of the twentieth century, and analogized to waltz and polka by Captain J.H. Thomson in Norcliffe G. Thompson and F. Laura Cannan's Hand-in-hand Figure Skating (1896). Indeed, forms of the waltz and other simple in-hold dances were the first real ice dances, and this is no accident; concurrently, no social dance had greater stature than the waltz in Europe and North America of the late nineteenth century.
And as I hope this blog has amply suggested, these fortuitous turns -- so many ballroom styles paired with compulsory patterns of a related name -- were no sort of pure good fortune at all, but entirely deliberate. Ballroom dance expanded in scope and public success in the 1910s and '20s courtesy of popular performers like Vernon and Irene Castle, a shift in societal perceptions of moral propriety, and an overall turn towards social good times in the post-Great War era. The Blackpool Dance Festival, contributing to the process of codifying the ballroom dances, began in 1920, while the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing began formulating its ballroom syllabus in 1924. A decade later, under the auspices of the National Skating Association, British rinks would host ice dancing competitions with an eye towards developing and codifying new ice dance patterns like tangos, waltzes, foxtrot and quickstep. If it's a constant challenge to discern the link between today's ballroom figures and yesterday's compulsory steps, it's not to argue that this kinship with ballroom was ever meant to be forgotten or discarded.
But perhaps most telling of the relationship between disciplines in this foundational period is the gift figure skating left to ballroom in 1938: a scoring program still called the skating system. Though today such a link is more irrelevant to ice dance than a foxtrot is to Dancesport, it's worthy of recall.
Ice dance has developed far beyond its initial strict requirements of hold and close skating, the more staid ballroom trappings of its first decades as a world-contested discipline. But in a scored, competitive system -- and in the absence of alternative dance standards to draw upon, like ballet's strict and clear-cut steps and demands of technique -- ice dance must either find a wholly new form of legitimately difficult, objectively assessed separated movements upon which to base itself as a discipline, or accept its roots as a couples' discipline, one that sets itself apart from pairs by virtue of the literal partner connection.
Given the ever-changing and ever-curious tweaks to the discipline's rules and syllabus on a near annual basis, some small heed to history -- and a form of objective fact no matter how scored -- seems essential.
If ice dance tangos can be ballroom and Argentine, compulsory, short-form or freestyle, they can also take their cues from a wholly other source: history. More than seems to be the case with other styles, like waltz or the Latin dances, tango seems to inspire choreographers and skaters to a vintage tribute.
Our source today is the tango that first developed in North America and Western Europe in the 1910s and '20s. In the wake of its introduction by Vernon and Irene Castle, it would be popularized through Rudolph Valentino's performance of an extremely stylized and less-than-authentic tango in 1921's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, set here to that utmost staple of tango, 1917's "La Cumparsita" by Uruguayan musician Gerardo Matos Rodriguez:
Some have observed that this performance is really more of an apache dance, but the identification of it as a tango, as performed by rising star Valentino, was sufficient to raise the dance’s profile further. And so the tango continued along its merry standardized way as a social dance, one performed to contemporary popular music, one increasingly-distanced from its Argentinian roots -- as suggested by this quite staid 1928 film, courtesy of British Pathé:
As demonstrated by Valentino and partner, the dance can have those slinky, staccato steps, but can also take on a livelier, more flirtatious character. It's like the early stage behavior cheekily ascribed to the American Tango style: happy, romantic, and only vaguely uneasy around the other. (Worth noting that the prospect of revisiting a Charleston-era version of tango is not alien to the ballroom world, as demonstrated in this show dance.)
But it's this ur-version of the tango that informed Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir's 2010-11 short dance. The twoeach described the piece as having a “Great Gatsby era feel.” But here's another twist from the other tangos we've discussed: the program, as required for that season's short dance, was actually constructed around the Golden Waltz pattern.
So with that bit of technical exposition out of the way, let’s get to the root of those “Gatsby era” allusions:
The tango music is indeed of era -- 1928's "Schenkst Du Beim Tango Mir Dein Herz" -- and while we've seen other takes on tango from Virtue and Moir, they have typically come in the form of something more closely related to the Argentine tango, with the force and passion associated. And this is key: we know that they knew, and that choreographer Marina Zoueva knew, how to craft a tango. The choices made here, avoiding much in the way of traditional enganches and boleos, is intentional. Instead, they've taken things in a rather more unusual direction, one which offers up a stagier sort of styling. Where the waltz is a true moment of connection, the tango framing is a narrative device which shares some of the propriety of that 1928 interpretation; there is a self-consciousness that's deliberate, and it feels in line with a sense of embodying a sort of play-acting old-fashioned tango dance: it's an imported, vaguely exotic style adapted for American (and European) society, popularized by an actor. The program's point of reference is a novel. It's far easier to see a reflection of that old British film footage than, say, some demonstration from a South American club.
But Virtue and Moir weren't the only couple to take up the vintage-imbued wango challenge that year, nor even the only Canadians. And this aesthetically vintage tango for Alexandra Paul and Mitch Islam offers up quite a reverse interpretation; instead of setting apart tango as a form of dance-driven plot device, it instead functions as dominant theme, with the waltz itself subsumed by the other dance's character courtesy of a 3/4-time arrangement of "La Cumparsita":
"A Los Amigos," the primary music selection, is a contemporary tango composition, but one that blends well with the traditional piece; tango movement at 1:18 and 2:26 is used to transition into and out of the Golden Waltz and obviously comprises the in-hold segments that sandwich that Golden Waltz. The dance itself is more familiarly Argentine than Virtue and Moir's, but neither was this an entirely foreign notion even in the Gatsby era:
The 1920s rendition may lack the more complex footplay of the style's later twentieth century re-emergence, but there are still elements worth noting for comparison here, like a demonstrably dramatic opening and an early form of the assisted leap Paul executes at 3:26 in the skating performance, seen here at 1:23 -- while the skated leap could also be considered a more refined and foot-intricate form of the salto at 1:06 in Valentino's dance.
And this past season, though music selection ("Con Buena Onda") was entirely modern, costuming -- reminiscent of this 1930 Louise Brooks clip -- suggested another spin on a mid-century sort of vintage for Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier in a tango free dance:
There are nods as expected to Argentine tango movement, such as the pasadas at 2:21 and 2:51 and the sequence from 3:18-3:25, but more central in connecting this dance to vintage tango is its dramatic nature. Tricks like Gilles' pass through Poirier's legs at 2:00 are not tango-traditional, but do contribute to a theatrical conceit, while the opening sequence could remind one of the highly stylized nature of the apache approach.
Given the recent welcome announcement of Tango Romantica- and Argentine Tango-based short dances for the 2018-19 season, our series on skated tango should offer a few relevant previews of routes teams will take; should the secondary rhythm be (as presently indicated) even more wide-ranging than those on offer for couples in that 2010-11 Golden Waltz season, the chance of a more creative take -- tango as story, tango as historical artifact -- is even more likely. But the most pressing question of all: will that bold couple, too, be Canadian? The season will tell.
