For this second entry in our tango series, we'll move away from the structure of the compulsory -- Argentine and Romantica -- tango and move ahead into its looser, choreographed free dance interpretations, along with a quick nod or two to the now-departed original dance.
And as the dance proper goes, perhaps the most useful analogy can be found with Tango Nuevo. The definition of what actually constitutes this concept is muddied -- it can also refer to a style of music used for the dance -- and it's blurry, too, how much this notion of a freer method of instruction, focused on improvisation and the "how" more than the "what" to dance, is itself a subgenre of the tango style. But holistically, it's a convenient framework for the idea of a more freeform take on the tango than that offered by the ballroom world or most traditional forms of Argentine tango, so we'll use this as our touchstone, and offer this "Oblivion" tango -- note the music -- from Claudia Miazzo and Jean Paul Padovani:
Non-compulsory tango in ice dance has most often come as an original dance, such as in the 1996-97 season. The form in that era still suggested some hybrid of ballroom tango attitude and crispness with recognizable Argentine foot play, as demonstrated in this program from Angelika Krylova and Oleg Ovsiannikov, including an enganche at 0:47 followed by a few extended sequences featuring high leg wraps, ganchos and boleos:
So in that alternately theatrical and ballroom-driven ice dance era of the late '90s, a dark, subtle free dance tango was its own kind of nuevo; as the product of young choreographer Igor Shpilband for U.S. champions Elizabeth Punsalan and Jerod Swallow, it was also a sort of foreshadowing of the more freely dance-centered era to come with the institution of a new judging system in the mid-2000s.
It is in many ways a dramatic tango. But it's also a tango that pays much proper heed to its off-ice inspiration, in the kind of ways we've established that compulsories simply could not. Importantly, though frequently more open than permissible in even tango nuevo, its more drawn-out qualities tie it far more closely to the feel of an Argentine tango than the ballroom variant.
And as a leading coach in that IJS era, Shpilband would develop something of a reputation as a tango choreographer, the style proving a particular strength in his side of a creative partnership with Marina Zoueva. This fast-paced but highly intricate "Assassination Tango" for new seniors Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir -- a rare original dance in the 2006-07 season to completely bypass the (Tango Nuevo) music of Astor Piazzolla -- highlights some of those shifts away from the prior decade's more ballroom-crisp take on the style, and a general sense of Argentine feel:
And a tango free for students Meryl Davis and Charlie White in 2010-11 showed some strong contrasts with the stylings apparent in predecessor Punsalan and Swallow's own free; while the references to specific footwork and figures remain, this is a true Golden Age of IJS free, with speed and interesting transitions among the program's primary emphases. The free would develop more polish as the season continued, culminating in Davis and White's first world title, but this early outing, though raw, contains a bit more tango content:
In this post-original dance era, tangos have naturally appeared with slightly less frequency than in previous years, but as a free dance it's proven rather popular among top-ranked couples in the 2016-17 season. And one demonstration in particular pairs a fair degree of intricacy with reminders of the more dramatic, less rushed approach of Punsalan and Swallow's take -- choreographed, coincidentally, by Zoueva:
The Charleston's history is a long and tangled one, with touch points including the possibility of a Renaissance-era predecessor in the Branle and its later development amidst the birth of jazz. This 1920s footage gives a good idea of the dance in its partnered -- and period-appropriate -- form:
A similar dance that came to overtake Charleston's popularity by the later 1920s was the Black Bottom, which shares the preceding dance's jazzy rhythms and loose limbs:
While the era has left behind little technical guidance for the solo form of either dance, this Charleston tutorial from Strictly Come Dancing pros Kevin Clifton and Karen Hauer nicely illustrates the dance's basics, once one moves past the video's first few seconds of exuberance:
Pay special attention to the attention called to arm positioning at 1:42 -- we'll see that in a transformed context later. Indeed, because so much emphasis in the floor form of these dances relies on a particular shuffle-styled step, twist and kick, references on the ice will tend to draw more from upper body or, perhaps, knee work.
In style terms, Charleston is one of those dances that's strictly bound to its time despite remaining familiar to later audiences (anomalies like Dancing With the Stars' "modern"Charlestons notwithstanding). It's danced on the vintage-loving swing and blues scene, and, in that 1920s-styled form, has also made its way to other dance competition shows like Britain's aforementioned Strictly Come Dancing:
So to ice dance, a best first place to turn might be the 2008-09 season. With an original dance featuring the designated theme of "Rhythms and Dances of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s," the 1920s vernacular proved a popular pick for many teams, including training mates Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir and Meryl Davis and Charlie White:
But an even more committed approach, given a free dance's longer duration, came from Canadian then-juniors Brianna Delmaestro and Timothy Lum, whose 2014-15 medley is something of a master class in injecting the real thing into a competitive skating program. They would not be held back in translating Charleston's footwork to ice:
The stage is obviously set immediately, but attitude also carries throughout -- there's a loose, jazzy quality to their movements, keeping a Charleston pace even when choreography isn't strictly in style. But it is, in fact, more often than not.
With a free dance's sometime investment in showcasing a range of moods and moves, a 1920s dance has in a few cases presented itself as a component of a more diverse dance. Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue's Great Gatsby was discussed on this blog in a far different context, but Charleston does inform their diagonal step sequence.
Though a general period spirit is more pervasive in Alexandra Paul and Mitch Islam's 2012-13 ragtime and jazz-heavy Legend of 1900 free dance, Charleston similarly does not comprise the program's bulk. One would, however, be hard-pressed to identify twizzles (starting at 2:42) that better embody the absolute character of those vernacular dances:
The arms in set #2 may look a little familiar, while the first transition might be worth comparing with 0:16-0:20 in the Black Bottom video.
Though Charleston's use in recent years has been amply demonstrated, we'll just close things out with a look at a very young team who exceeded their years with the musicality and performance quality of particularly the "Hot Honey Rag" conclusion of this 2014-15 Chicago free dance. Gwen Sletten and Elliot Verburg, your pairing will be missed:
With Alexandra Aldridge and Daniel Eaton taking on traditional Indian dance in their 2013-14 season free dance, it may be timely to review Indian dance's on-ice history -- a lengthier one than some may know.
Most demonstrations of Indian dance in Western outlets, whether an ice dance program or a routine on So You Think You Can Dance, is termed Bollywood, drawing its inspiration from the somewhat hybridized style of movement presented in the lavish dance sequences from that world of film. The best beginner's guide to Bollywood dance, complete with image and video, may come from BBC. Also worth consulting is this excellent brief history of Bollywood dance, from its earlier days rooted in classical Indian styles to later influences from Western popular dance. Movement is thoroughly explored here, but perhaps the central point worth noting is the foundation of Indian dance upon gesture. While this specific characteristic can mark out the style and make it perhaps rather subject to mimicry, the import of each gesture is great and thus Western dancers -- and ice dance teams -- have more often than not taken an effort to learn from teachers of the style.
The most famous take on Bollywood on ice, of course, belongs to Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who were well-placed to make a big splash with their interpretation. The team and coach/choreographer Marina Zoueva worked with a former professional dancer in an effort to understand and faithfully reproduce the dance's arm and body movements to the ice, while also paying mind to relative authenticity in costuming:
The program's callbacks to its source material are many. Davis's pose at 3:36 is quite explicitly a reference to the image of the Nataraj. Gesture and shape are utilized throughout the dance, including in element work, and take note as well of the head and neck movements at 0:56-0:58, 1:28, and 1:53, and the body positions at 1:13-1:15 and 3:02-3:05, which harken to traditional bharatanatyam's demi-plie in first position, as discussed in the above article.
But as a comparative note, it is worth taking a look at the original dance sequences from which the music for Davis and White's program was drawn: Kajra Re, Silsila Ye Chaahat Ka, and the purest of the dance numbers, Dola Re Dola:
Strongly-choreographed as their effort is, though, Davis and White were not the only or even first team to explore the possibilities of Bollywood and traditional Indian dance movement on the ice. In a twist of fate, in the same season in which Davis and White's original dance appeared, the novice team of Madeline Heritage and Nathaniel Fast also competed a Bollywood program using one of the same music cuts:
The team's opening pose, primarily Heritage's position, is its own take of sorts on the Nataraj, which they immediately follow with several quick side-by-side steps and a twizzle and glide into the demi-plie position. Despite the requirements of the free dance, nods to Bollywood are continued in their subsequent footwork, including the knee bends at 1:19 and 1:20 and dynamic arm positions from 1:31-1:34, and carried through the entrance and interstitial steps in their twizzles at 1:40 and the arms in the second spin position at 3:07, leading into a return to some side-by-side dance work. Heritage's lift positions, too, also reflect snapshots taken from Indian dance. Although imperfectly executed, the team's free dance can rival Davis and White's OD as the most consistently carried-through attempt at reproducing Bollywood movement on ice.
Of course, despite the nods made by both teams in some steps and positioning, the lower body components of the original Bollywood examples -- the hip motion and isolations, the light and swift-moving footwork, the weight-shifting -- are, like genres previously explored along the lines of hip hop and modern, not easily translatable to ice. But what most marks out Bollywood dance -- and most challenges its interpretation in a competitive ice dance program -- is its scope and scale. The Bollywood dance sequence is not created to be much less than spectacle, a feat rather difficult to replicate by two parties in a brightly-lit but sparsely-accoutred ice rink.
But presenting its own challenges is classical Indian dance, of which bharatanatyam might be the most well-known example, as well as that style which informs Aldridge and Eaton's approach. While bharatanatyam is too comprised in large part of gesture, it is equally reliant on footwork. The building block of the bharatanatyman is, in fact, the adavu, a combination of hand, leg, and overall body movements. While some attempt might, again, be made to nod to these postures when choreographically permissible, it is again down more to the mudras, or hand gestures, to suggest traditional Indian movement in a program. An exceptionally thorough index of gestures, including photos, is linked through this page, while this video also offers a detailed rundown.
Maureen Ibanez and Neil Brown's 2007-08 original dance, set to the Bollywood number "Bole Chudiyan," is dominated more often than not by a fairly standard approach to the elements, but a number of choreographic touches do work to establish almost something more in line with a classical Indian approach than the flashier, bouncier Bollywood of the other dances:
Take, as one example, their opening sequence from 0:35-0:46 and compare with this invocatory bharatanatyman performance from Savitha Sastry:
Another, somewhat less faithful go at classical dance, also set to a Bollywood cut, was delivered in the same season by Zoe Blanc and Pierre-Loup Bouquet, adorned in rather less traditional costuming than the other examples offered here. While their opening sequence, too, points to the source genre with the gesture work, the overall movement and choreography is more ice-based than otherwise. The team works in their Indian movement primarily through occasional returns to gesture, such as the transition from the in-hold sequence moving into the no-touch step sequence at 1:55, creating a kind of patchwork of Indian-inspired dance and standard elements. But the gestures, though not especially well-articulated, can be traced to the mudras, such as Blanc's hamsasya while in lift at 2:49 and again in end pose.
While an attempt to reproduce similar gestures and body movements is clear in these more traditionally-inspired programs, one additional component is both quite evident in her performance and quite clearly absent in general from its on-ice counterparts: the use of eye movement, another layer of meaning in classical dance that may be of fairly minor consequence to a judging panel more concerned with larger and more skating-bound detail as well as simply difficult to carry through while executing elements and constant on-ice motion -- though a little nod is offered, as noted by commentators Tom Hammond and Tracy Wilson, in the opening moments of Davis and White's original dance.
One last, rather loose take on the concept of the Indian dance or Bollywood program may come from Lynn Kriengkrairut and Logan Giulietti-Schmitt, who in 2009-10 skated their free dance to selections from the Slumdog Millionaire score. The team focused their movement efforts almost exclusively in the lyrical vein -- yet they still opt to include a few gestural moments at midpoint:
In wrapping this look at Bollywood and bharatanatyam, it's important to note a certain irony of bringing either genre to a coupled-dance discipline: for as much a cornerstone as dance is of the Bollywood film, dance sequences between only a hero and heroine are infrequent or less dance-intensive than group sequences; classical dance, meanwhile, is traditionally a solo art. So ice dance by its nature, then, might be challenged by more than physics to most faithfully replicate its source matter -- but the most faithful efforts can also reveal the surprising possibilities for its on-ice recreation.
