13. Paso Doble

At last, an overdue look at this year's senior compulsory pattern, the Paso Doble, a style which, more than others from the ballroom family, has had some unexpected success -- and challenge where less noted -- in its translation to icy life.

While intimately associated with Spanish culture, namely its bullfighting tradition, Paso Doble as dance actually originated in France as a sort of military march and later gained full steam as a style in that same country in the 1920s and '30s. The dramatic nature of its character meant it developed primarily as an exhibition dance more than social, and it's exceedingly challenging to locate examples of Paso Doble as known in the west that are not a demonstration of the Latin ballroom dance, although another folkish strain exists in countries such as the Philippines. This video featuring Christoph Kies and Blanca Ribas Turón performing to a song most closely bound with the Paso (and not unfamiliar to skating fans), "España Cañi," is a ballroom offering with some obvious touches of the dance's flamenco and gypsy influences; the song title, in fact, means "Gypsy Spain."


Meanwhile, this instructional series, designated for the bronze, silver and gold international levels of the dance, provides an exceptionally useful rundown of its figures:


It's likely that no ice dance Paso Doble is better known and remembered than Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean's 1983-84 Original Set Pattern dance, made famous as part of their Olympic gold-winning performance:


The team quite obviously follows one particular key tenet of Paso -- characterization, here with Dean embodying the matador in machismo attitude and Torvill his cape. (Dean, in choreographing this season's Paso Doble short dance for Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, would revisit the concept.) In other senses, however, the actual Paso influence is rather difficult to discern; the interplay between dancers is considerably minimized in Torvill's more passively choreographed role as cape, while the floor Paso's touches of flamenco styling evident in arm gesture, stance and general full body expression are also minimal. Notably, the music used here -- Rimsky-Korsakov's "Capriccio Espagnol" -- is in 6/8 time, versus Paso's 2/4 rhythm. Because the couple spend virtually no time in face-to-face hold, comparison to Paso figures is challenging, though a variant on a traveling spin can be noted at moments like 0:51-0:55, while touches of separation might be present in execution of certain turns.

In a surprising turn of events for this blog, however, a more direct tribute to ballroom Paso can be seen in the 1938 compulsory pattern that bears its name, performed in this clip by Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin at their victorious 2009 World Championships:


The tango hold is already an improvement over many a killian-heavy compulsory we've examined here, but also clearly links the dance across disciplines. While any attempted nod at the figures is very general at best, the upright frame demanded of Paso on the floor is especially emphasized here in the slip steps (serving this season as part of the short dance's first key point); hand flourish too is encouraged in the moments directly following those steps, first at 0:47 and 0:50 here, lending to more obvious Paso character.

While many of this season's short dances draw more overtly on flamenco than Paso -- though this, too, can work to enhance a Paso display, as suggested above -- a few are more ballroom-driven in nature, such as that from Grand Prix Final champions Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje. The cape element in Weaver and Poje's dance is more abstracted along the lines of ballroom's approach, with sequences like those from 2:33-2:36 and 2:43-2:45 rather akin to loose interpretations of a caping walk. The posing from 2:59-3:04, too, reflects the combative dynamic often demonstrated in performance:


With ice dance analysis concluded for now, I'll leave with this showdance interpretation of Paso from Pavlo Barsuk and Anna Trebunskaya, relying heavily on the Latin vocabulary but offering a little more by way of comparison to the skating realm with its continuous movement and incorporation of non-permissible elements like the concluding lift:

8. R(h)umba

It stands to reason that any dance style characterized in part by sustained eye contact and sexual tension would, naturally, be embodied in compulsory dance form by a pattern skated almost exclusively in killian hold.

Rumba hit the ice in 1938, in the process acquiring an "H" in its name that binds it quite closely to its time and context. Name notwithstanding, this r(h)umba shouldn't be confused with the later-established International and American ballroom forms, and the pattern might, in its own way, be the purest legacy existing of the style's first introduction to American and European society. This first wave came not through exposure to the actual Afro-Cuban dance (which is a very different entity), but popular new Cuban music -- and, at that, in possible error, with hit song's "El Manisero (The Peanut Vendor)" identified to its American audiences as a rumba rather than a son. The dance that subsequently emerged may have been characterized by a certain style of music and movement, but what it was not bound by was tempo. The possibility for an upbeat rumba, while anathema to its subsequent ballroom development, was actually preserved in its compulsory dance counterpart, with its 176 bpm tempo requirement a rather startling contrast to International rumba's range of around 96-112 or even the faster-paced American's of 120-144.

So what was created by Walter Gregory in London lived on through a standard compulsory pattern, demonstrated here by Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon:


Despite the couple's chemistry, the dance by its general nature is peppy and fairly devoid of the lusty tensions and conflicts by which both ballroom and Afro-Cuban form of the dance are characterized, to say nothing of its choreographic questionability. It has little to do with the dance outlined here, and certainly juxtaposing it against this example of a basic rumba from Franco Formica and Oxana Lebedew does little to justify the pattern's name:


But while ice dance may have liked its r(h)umba kicky and killian-heavy, the ballroom would take the greater share of influence in later years.

Much discussion of on-ice rumba zeroes in upon a program some expected to become the pattern for a revised take on the compulsory: Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean's "Historia de un Amor" original dance, one of the vehicles of their 1994 Olympic comeback:


This piece is closer to a recognizable rumba than any compulsory pattern, but there's enough that's very much bound to the competitive ice. Most notably, the frequent closed holds, typically emblematic of a faithful recreation of ballroom, unusually here run somewhat counter to rumba's more open holds and separations. Certain choreographic flourishes, like the knee bends from 1:22-1:26, while well-suited to the music, don't contribute strongly to the rumba flavor and would serve equally well in any dramatic piece. For the limitations imposed on it, though, this program does convey direct Latin movement where it can. The hip sway is immediately noticed and present throughout, and the turns are a familiar touch, as is the somewhat languid pot-stirrer at 2:53. There are obvious injections of Latin passion with moments at 1:18 and 1:38. It is, overall, more of an ice dance rumba -- one much more familiar than the compulsory version -- than a rumba on ice, but its style is certainly drawn from its source dance.

The rumba returned to the original dance in 1999-00 and 2005-06, though in both cases in required combination with at least one additional (faster) Latin rhythm. Such a rule makes it trickier to scout out lengthy-enough examples of the style's further on-ice development, but a few can be spotted, and reflect a gradually growing influence from ballroom. The 1999-00 OD from Margarita Drobiazko and Povilas Vanagas -- scored in part, incidentally, to "Historia de un Amor" -- includes an authentic leg-wrap; Dubreuil and Lauzon's 2005-06 salsa/rumba combo must grapple with the inclusion of quite a few more required elements than the previous examples necessitated, but does incorporate a lot of rumba-esque flourish into its slow section.

But even as the feeling of an International ballroom rumba intensified, the choreographic division between that made for the ice and that for the floor certainly remained. Take a careful look, for example, at this 2010 exhibition performance from the high-profile if short-lived coupling of ballroom champion Slavik Krylklyvy and Anna Melnikova:


While there's much here to take into consideration, a few movements worth noting upfront are the opening pose at 0:52 and the rotational lift at 1:04, as well as the in-hold side-by-side work beginning at 3:01. There's also a fairly spectacular pot-stirrer at 3:47 which points up the possibly surprising fact that certain rotational footwork seems destined to be more smoothly executed on floor than ice. Overall, while rumbas designed for exhibition can take on a variety of elements and tricks while remaining in the simple framework of tempo, attitude, and general quality of movement, this particular piece presents a nice choreographic selection -- and is also one of the more-viewed strictly ballroom examples on YouTube.

When the rhumba was revived as the source pattern for the 2011-12 short dance, the vast majority of teams elected to pair it with the samba or another of the recommended quicker rhythms. And one team, working with choreographer Romain Haguenauer, went a very different route, choosing instead to highlight the rumba of the rhumba:


Any actual choreographic inspiration behind Alexandra Paul and Mitch Islam's program is unknown, but watching in conjunction with the above sample is interesting. The style is, like previous goes at rumba, designed to echo that of the floor, but certain elements are more striking than others. The rotational move at 1:44 is the most obvious derivation; the brief pot-stirrer at 2:20 and leg-wrap at 0:53 are slightly more general callbacks to ballroom Latin as seen in the other ice dance programs, much as particular moments in the no-touch step sequence, like the arm motions from 2:58-2:59 and hip and shoulder sway at about 3:04, are also suggestive. The quick flip lift at 3:27, though imperfect, can in ballroom context perhaps be considered a very simplified take on something like the movement at 1:20 in Slavik and Anna's dance. In this same context, even Paul and Islam's straight-line lift at 1:23 -- a particular element of the team's carried through several programs and dance genres over the seasons -- echoes just a little something along the lines of 4:21-4:23 in Slavik and Anna's performance. There's also a bit more in the general way of rumba movement here: the transition to the quicker "Havana Slide" -- less pure rumba than the 2046 Theme of the program's first half -- provides an opportunity for a few seconds of side-by-side in-hold "walking" movement.

Paul's costuming also, incidentally, seems a particularly rumba-inspired choice here.

R(h)umba's history on the ice is both long and relatively challenged. But development certainly points to a growing effort to blend the recognizable components of ballroom work with ice dance's restrictions. A true rumba can not be replicated, but the attempts to honor it more fully can provide a basis for more thorough experimentation in future. And by 2020, perhaps some revolutionary team will even sustain a high-speed pot-stirrer for three seconds or more.