17. Samba

Between next month's Rio Olympics and the recent announcement of the 2016-17 season's revisitation of the Latin short dance, it may finally be time to turn our eyes to that most complex of Latin dances: the samba.

A quick look at its overall history is useful and highlights certain of its historical complexities. Note that Brazilian samba has a somewhat march-like quality courtesy of its 2/4 tempo and includes both solo (like Samba no pé) and partnered (such as Samba de Gafieira) forms, quite distinct in both cases from its Latin ballroom namesake -- so tracing its connections to on-ice samba is an exercise, to say the least.

With their 2011-12 Latin short dance which includes a batucada percussion piece -- traditional for Brazilian samba -- Nathalie Pechalat and Fabian Bourzat opted for a breezy vibe suggestive of a visit to Rio:


This samba no pé video presents the dance's basic steps, which we can note Pechalat and Bourzat representing in the separated samba sequence starting at 2:50 above. There's a very key signifier of ballroom samba also present at about 3:17 here -- and we'll talk about that next.

Ballroom samba tends to present the more frequent progenitor for the ice dance counterpart. As a particularly complex dance, there's no one-stop tutorial video for these figures, but this samba round from the WDSF PD World DanceSport Championship Latin gives a fair summary, provided one doesn't mind an endless loop of "Straight to Memphis," an experience in repetition that, though deliberate, is not unlike that of sitting through a Latin original or short dance at Worlds. Not particularly prominent in this round is the trademark samba roll, but as Pechalat and Bourzat demonstrated, it's a great way to shorthand the dance style given the limitations of footwork and certain multidirectional movement.

Ice dance offers one samba compulsory pattern, the Silver Samba, created in 1963 and last skated in international senior competition in 2000-01. More recently, it served as the base pattern for the 2014-15 junior short dance. Here it is performed by event winners Oksana Grishuk and Evgeni Platov at the 1996 World Championships:


Despite best efforts in the choreographed intro and outro, it will come as no surprise to regular readers that outside of the 2/4 time, there is exceedingly little to define the pattern itself as Latin, let alone samba -- though perhaps the slip steps seen at 0:58 and 1:28 are the smallest tip of the chapéu to solo samba footwork. Its use for a short dance permitted greater incorporation of concepts from the ballroom world, as in this program from Junior World champions Anna Yanovskaya and Sergey Mozgov.

Samba also served as an Original Set Pattern in 1971-72 and 1989-90, with a number of examples from the second season's dance available on YouTube. For those in search of Latin ballroom authenticity on ice, the 1980s and early '90s may not be your optimal destination. It's taking nothing away from the skating itself to note that the World Championship-winning "La Cucaracha" OSP of Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko is more Copa Cabana than Blackpool. But exceptions could emerge, and the team who ranked only third in this segment presented a dramatically truer -- and more tastefully subdued -- interpretation; check out Maya Usova and Alexander Zhulin's samba rolls at 0:36 and subsequently repeated with the second pattern pass:


And as introduced at top with Pechalat and Bourzat's routine, samba was also an optional secondary component of 2011-12's rhumba-based short dance, after having appeared in Latin Combination original dances in 1999-2000 and 2005-06. Another offering, from Anna Cappellini and Luca Lanotte, does some of its own line-straddling between ballroom and Brazilian styles, but leans a bit more heavily in the former direction:


The hip action, highlighted at moments like 2:43, is among the stronger you'll get in a skated samba. To identify just a few figures, the samba-opening sequence beginning at 2:06 is essentially a shadow traveling volta; the change in hold from 2:46-2:48 is like a fragment of a promenade run while a similar series of turns starting at 2:16 feel a small bit like open rocks. The side-by-side footwork at 2:10, 2:44 and 2:58, in particular, are moments a bit more readily tied to samba no pé.

And despite the frequent recurrence of Latin in mandated original or compulsory programs, samba, of course, can also on occasion filter its way into a free dance, as it did for Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who also presented the style in a modified version of this number for the 2011-12 short dance a season later:


Hip action should be duly noted from program's opening.

Perhaps the best-known use of "Hip Hip Chin Chin" in the ballroom world belongs to this exhibition from Max Kozhevnikov and Yulia Zagoruychenko, which combines samba, cha cha, and a bit of freestyling, and it might not be amiss to suggest it may have had a little impact on certain components of the samba sections in Virtue and Moir's program:


But what's especially interesting about this particular ice dance interpretation is its utilization of in-hold figures, like the stationary samba walks beginning at 1:00. There are echoes of the original "Hip Hip Chin Chin" with a moment like the separation at 2:25 in the ballroom number as compared with the entry to the circular twizzles at 1:06 in Virtue and Moir's program, and the illustration of the song's title in both cases. It's the ability to integrate less familiar figures and elements with a free dance's demand for hold and continuous ice coverage, however, that particularly impresses. The opening steps are reminiscent of cruzados walks; watch for something like a traveling set of samba locks at 1:27 and 4:40. The actual diagonal step sequence -- and all those ice dance elements, like lifts, anathema to a competitive ballroom number -- can only embody so much of the samba syllabus, but it's scattered throughout two non-rumba segments' worth of transitions.

One of the best things to be said for the evolution of Latin (and many other dance genres) in ice dance is an expanding commitment to accuracy towards off-ice counterpart. While a championship round of 2011-12 and 2014-15's senior and/or junior short dances could be wearying in terms of musical repetition, there's something refreshing about even attempts at faithfulness, and even moreso about successful ones. The next Olympic year's rhumba-centered short dance could mean a retread of the last go-round, but can also open more opportunity for experimentation -- of an ultimately rather conventional sort.

11. Theatrical Dance

The Finnstep, paired with this season's accompanying rhythms, lends itself to a nice range of interpretive approaches, from standard ballroom to social swing or Charleston. Its tempo requirements, as well as the perceived character of the dance, also tend towards more traditional or standard musical selections -- and, in a few cases, selections from the great American theatrical songbook.

This installment will now take a slightly different tack from others, focusing here less on technique than a rather more general category of dance to which the Finnstep and foxtrot rhythms have led a handful of teams -- call it show, or theatrical ballroom. Performance-oriented, a little old-fashioned, and very American -- even if executed here by two Canadian couples and one Italian duo.

There might be no better point of reference for the style considered here than the enduring efforts of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, whose frequent on-screen partnership throughout the 1930s in particular essentially defined the classic dance film, courtesy of numbers like "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time:


While their film career brought their styles of popular performance dance and theatrically-inflected ballroom -- along with the debut or popularizing of several classic songs from composers like Berlin, Porter, and Gershwin -- to a far wider audience than stage alone ever could, they were also able to use film to their own advantage. While, of course, the closeness of camera and size of screen help foster both an intimacy and grandeur less easily accessed in live performance, Astaire took pains to instill one key component of live performance to the realm of filmed dance: the single-shot dance sequence, with cameras capturing one performance in full, cut-free and focused as far as possible on capturing the whole movement of bodies. This certainly, in its way, draws a bit of a link between Astaire & Rogers and the efforts of our ice dancers, though, sadly, most event cameras have failed to adhere to their own clean, seamless, dancers-in-full-view half of the bargain.

And in a more fortuitously direct segue to the short dance topic at hand, Rogers was actually introduced to a wide audience via the lead role in George & Ira Gershwin's 1930 debut of Girl Crazy, a production on which Astaire assisted in choreographic instruction. The show, of course, was later revised and revived in 1992 as Crazy for You, from which the music for Alexandra Paul & Mitch Islam's short dance was drawn.


It should be noted that while their program takes from a theatrical score, it does not draw from musical's book, and this 1992 Kennedy Center Honors performance of "I Got Rhythm" also points up the distinction between approaches -- the rousing and rustic group number and the typically elegant duet. But if the couple's interpretation does not derive from its strict source material, the extroversion of its expression and the outward-orientation of movement do point to its tackling a more theatrical than ballroom angle -- and an alternate category of source material might be considered. Take a look again at moments 0:54-1:03 and 2:19-2:30 in the short dance above and then take a gander at 1:00-1:15 in this particular number of legend:


Too, the choreographic aesthetic of Roberta's "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" is a little like the midline writ large, while 1:28 offers a passing resemblance to the short dance's opening sequence, 1:35 to end pose, and other moments throughout simply suggesting a spiritual kinship.

Film and theatre have an interesting marriage where the short dance source material for two of the world's top ten teams is concerned. 42nd Street, the centerpiece of programs for both Kaitlyn Weaver & Andrew Poje and Anna Cappellini & Luca Lanotte, made its mark as a major theatrical musical in 1980, but drew as its inspiration the 1933 musical film of the same name (which, it may as well be noted, included among its cast Ginger Rogers). As befitting a Depression-era performance dance piece, tap plays a central stylistic role in both productions, though staging is a rather different story. Take this performance of the title number, featuring the cast of its 2001 revival:


Though a group number, its sensibility can be compared readily enough to Weaver & Poje's program, for which the team worked closely with actor and choreographer Geoffrey Tyler. Their take, while more both more abstract and condensed than a musical's number, interprets a storyline loosely based on the musical's themes and works in a few clever moments of tap-inspired ice work at 1:00 and variously from 2:10-2:25:


(As a further note, consider also lead Kate Levering's dress from the 2001 performance above and the number worn by Weaver in the team's first outing at the U.S. International Skating Classic.)

While the two are excellent actors, Cappellini & Lanotte's program, for its part, relies in movement terms more on a standard ice dance vernacular than a clear intent to play off of the theatrical vocabulary. Beginning at 2:45, however, there are a few key moments that tip the hat in their own way to tap:


Cappellini & Lanotte do draw things somewhat full circle with their choice in costumes, which evoke less a show-biz number and more the street scene that comprises the original film's take on "42nd Street" -- along with a gritty pre-Hays Code streak most definitely not apparent in either ice dance program:


Of course, any ice dance program is in its own way a small, often-filmed performance number, albeit one bound to requirements of motion and scored by panels of technical specialists and judges. But the program making overt reference to its own performance nature creates its own category and particular challenges for any team taking it on. An introverted couple can find success by making connection its own projected element; natural showmen can carry off moves that could otherwise seem gimmicky in translation. And in the case of a short dance with its strictly-prescribed necessities, such an approach can offer an alternative, almost self-reflective take on mandatory movement -- a miniature movie in the midst of competition.