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.
I have in the past year become more comfortable at publicly venturing opinions of a skating nature while continuing my work as a journalist of the sport. Though I never hope to hurt feelings -- and I will generally avoid offering negative views explicitly aimed at a team or choreographer on the basis purely of personal taste, and avoid strong opinion in event coverage, analysis and features unless identified as opinion-based -- there are a few reasons why I will defend the overall practice.
1. In traditional sports journalism, from basketball to tennis, it's certainly the norm, if not actively encouraged, to challenge play strategies or starting line-ups and rotations. Music and choreography are among skating, and especially ice dance's, versions of that.
2. And because I also cover skating from an aesthetic angle, room for subjective criticism is equally permissible. I believe strongly in use of music to its maximum effect and demonstrations of close skating unless demanded otherwise by a style; choreography that overlooks musical nuance in favor of lyrics and merely overt highlights or uses openness for no justified reason is something of which I have and will take a much dimmer view.
3. I will never posit that because I may not like a song or piece of choreography, that by default means the team in question should be scored less for the program in question, as though my preferences are in any way arbiters of objective quality. Last season, one of my least favorite free dances came from one of the teams I most respect; my taste judgment (and feeling, perhaps, that the material failed to provide a proper showcase -- more on that below) did not in any way mitigate their skill set or my belief in the marks they should merit based on what was demonstrated of their ability.
Likewise, as I've touched on previously, a team should never be scored for "spellbinding" quality over and against all other PCS criteria that are rooted more in reasonably objective technical assessments -- let alone receive any significant TES bump in such a scenario.
But I would venture to argue that music and choreography can help or hurt a team -- if judges are convinced a team is one-note, if choreography fails to highlight a team's best attributes as technicians or performers, if music doesn't present enough opportunity to showcase a team's dance ability. Improper choices can sometimes mean anything from deductions for a mismatched rhythm to feedback that demands a program overhaul. Ultimately, that's why music and choreography are open for criticism: they are part and parcel of outcome in this sport of skating.
Didier Gailhaguet, president of the French Ice Sports Federation and 2016 candidate for ISU president, made an illuminating observation on the state of ice dance in a recent New York Times article:
“I was up high in the arena the night of [Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron's] free dance, and for at least two minutes of their four-minute program, it was so quiet you could hear the wings of a fly beating [...] Even up where I was, I could hear the sound of their skates on the ice. That means what? That means something was happening with the audience, something we can’t quantify but something that we have to give value to in our sport."
An unquantifiable and deeply subjective element, one could reasonably argue, actually has very little place in the outcomes of athletic endeavor.
Journalism by its nature is intended to elucidate the factual. This is in principle; in practice we know it is far more complicated. But the process is muddled far more by reportage on a sport in which fact -- in the form of scoring and placements, what we’re told -- can bear a striking difference from what’s seen by the eye, what’s enumerated in the sport’s own rule book. The Program Components category is not an artistic "second mark": as written, it does a fair job quantifying those qualities which may and do contribute to a more aesthetically pleasing, but athletically rigorous, performance.
And the simple fact is that this is a sport. That is how it defines itself; that is why it remains in the Olympics despite threats in the more openly -- but no more -- political era pre-IJS. My work has spent much time uncovering the artistic elements within ice dance via the utilization of vocabulary from the realm of off-ice dance, a valid line of inquiry given emphases on compulsory patterns and short and original dances meant to reflect a dance style’s “authentic” nature. But that dance is meaningless without a foundation in skill -- trained ability, determined effort at complexity. That is what I ultimately prize, whether it seems to be rewarded or not. And that seems to be lessening in value among the ranks, including perhaps among some teams I’ve esteemed quite highly and quite publicly in previous seasons. It’s a tremendous disappointment to see what such pressures have meant for teams with such undervalued and fundamental strengths.
Skaters and their choreographers are certainly welcome to paint with all the colors of the wind. They should not be rewarded based on how deeply those colors make a judge or a certain number of audience members feel.
Choreoliteralism is not a dance genre, per se, though it may certainly correlate with the off-ice category of lyrical dance, in its primary meaning -- a balletic/jazz-rooted form illustrating lyrics equal to or over melodic line and rhythm. In other words, lyrical dance relies on a fairly literal depiction of a song's lyrics. On the ice, lyrical has primarily come to be used to refer to any soft, often romantic program style drawing on ballet-influenced upper body shape and line and, ironically, usually skated to instrumentals. Examples in the current free dance era alone are numerous; Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir's 2009-10 Mahler, Kaitlin Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker's 2013-14 Amelie and Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron's 2014-15 Mozart all can be classed under this umbrella (while the latter team's free was inspired by a contemporary ballet, on-ice movement in its limitations and the primary emphasis on emotionalism over refinement would compel me to consider the piece more lyrical than ballet, versus a program clearly drawing on recognized elements of ballet technique).
But all of that is to miss the point, which is the true concept of "lyrical" dance in skating form. And here we draw a distinction between choreoliteralism and narrative movement. A good program can tell a story through abstract gesture. Virtue and Moir's Carmen utilized modern dance language to tell a reasonably clear-cut story; Hawayek and Baker's new Theory of Everything free plainly depicts Stephen Hawking's battle with ALS without sacrificing the integrity of a contemporary dance approach. No, what we talk about when we talk about choreoliteralism is something more on-the-nose.
Christopher Dean, in the 2011-12 season, presented two shining examples of the concept. Watch and listen, here, how Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier start their "Pure Imagination" free dance:
Gilles' brother Todd, who had some success in prior partnerships with Trina Pratt and Jane Summersett, teamed for that same season with Emily Samuelson, herself an accomplished skater with Evan Bates. The pairing would be short-lived, but they did have the opportunity to skate this Dean creation to a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" -- a lyric of key inspiration:
It's worth acknowledging that sometimes this literal approach can be taken without lyrics, as such -- see Dmitri Soloviev lip-sync a bird's cry, or Nikita Katsalapov enact Sam's shooting while a V/O dialogue track shares Elena-as-Molly's distress. But these are the extravagant cases, and further pursuit may lead us down an unwanted road of many a most unfortunate death on ice. We'll return our primary focus to that smaller concern, those moments which do not come in the service of conveying a specific storyline through overt gesture (an approach which can itself be fraught with choreography by pantomime), but rather a simple lyric.
Choreoliteralism has taken on a new vogue within the work of Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon. An early non-competitive effort from the duo more abstractly hinted at this approach, with Virtue and Moir's 2010 "I Want to Hold Your Hand" show program highlighting a variety of hand-to-hand motions. As full-time coaches and competitive choreographers, the duo, and Dubreuil in particular, have shown a special interest in lyrical material by its skating definition, perhaps making the transition towards more literally lyrical moments this season a logical one.
While the element is subtle enough in itself, costuming turns a key moment in Elisabeth Paradis and François-Xavier Ouellette's free dance to Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" into a great demonstration of the choreoliteral lift:
Meanwhile, reference to birds and wings -- to say nothing of reaching arms -- translates clearly in Alexandra Paul and Mitch Islam's "Where Is It Written?" free:
But 2015's choreoliteral trend is not confined to the rink at Gadbois, as Gilles and Poirier, in a short dance made this time by coaches Carol Lane and Juris Razgulajevs, can attest:
Outside of the competitive realm, an additional rather interesting contribution to our sample comes from a non-skating choreographer -- a recent creation by Dancing With the Stars ballroom pro Sharna Burgess for Meryl Davis and Charlie White. This piece to Florence + the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over" contains not one example of choreoliteralism -- nay, the practice abounds; identify a verb and see it realized:
Among specific moments, it's difficult to see given the angle in this video, but in a recording of their latest performance at Rockefeller Center, Davis nicely illustrates the concept of being "hit" by happiness. Kisses are blown at 1:47; the duo runs at 2:16. It is, however, worth acknowledging that Burgess's Dancing With the Stars work tends to take a more musically-based approach.
Literal interpretation of lyrics is certainly practiced outside the world of strictly lyrical dance, as in Bollywood, for one, with its marriage of theatre and dance, as well as Western musical theatre to an extent, as contemporary choreographer Mia Michaels -- uncomfortable with literal lyrical choreo in her usual field -- recognized when adapting herself to Broadway's environs. Of course, taken too far, the choreoliteral practice also becomes easy fodder for humor, as in, say, Saturday Night Live's series of "DeMarco Brothers" sketches in the early 2000s, featuring a pair of aspiring back-up dancers who thoroughly acted out lyrics to Bon Jovi or Britney Spears songs in a bid to obtain employment with such musical idols.
Prior to the introduction of lyric vocals in the non-dance disciplines of skating, a common criticism leveled against the suggested use of such was indeed the risk of programs becoming a game of charades more than an interpretation of pure music, an interesting fear when, given the nature of its elements and timing, dance is arguably the more musically sensitive of the disciplines. But this concern (one not yet significantly borne out in singles or pairs) also points to a simply different understanding in skating than in dance of lyrics' purpose; what can be a point of dispute among some in the vast and various world of dance off the ice is somewhat more limited in skating, with existing concerns about the line between kitsch and art alongside considerable limitations upon movement. A dancer can use full body to express music and lyric alike; a skater with less range of motion may be reduced to the odd arm gesture or punning element, a moment that draws attention to itself for its sheer outlier status.
But perhaps the fundamental fear is one not quite touched upon, and it's one of sheer difficulty: creating and executing movement to provided words is simply easier than creating and executing movement rooted in the textures and nuances of any piece of music, instrumental or vocal. Words are obvious to any choreographer familiar with a language; musical subtleties are sometimes not. A given gesture may be challenging in its own right to deliver, but is it fundamentally more challenging than the act of moving with full awareness of subtle rhythmic and melodic shifts through any live performance's pitfalls?
Choreoliteralism is, ultimately, one possible approach for the skating choreographer, typically one facet of a larger, more general tack. Can a creative concept be an objective wrong? Provided especially that it fulfills all requirements for the competitive program, no. But can it prove a disappointment, especially when applied to those teams with genuine musical ability? For this writer, yes.
