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:

12. Foxtrot

Where foxtrot meets ice, the primary takeaway should be less on specific steps or even hold or frame, and more on a general rhythmic quality; the dance is marked by its slow-slow-quick-quick pattern, creating a sense of rise and fall that, when done well, can be reflected in a program.

What's particularly of note where the foxtrot is concerned is its two strands of history. While today it's classified as a standard ballroom dance, it originated as a product of the popular successes of vaudeville -- attributed in its barest form to namesake showman Harry Fox -- and performance ballroom exemplified by Vernon and Irene Castle, trendsetters of the gradually emerging Jazz Age (seen here performing their own namesake Castle Walk). The dance that began as an emblem of the ragtime era would, however, with the passage of a little time and a migration overseas, become refined in that ballroom-crazed period of 1930s Britain that also saw the development of the foundational compulsory ice dances -- including, but naturally, the foxtrot, demonstrated here. This new "slow foxtrot" essentially supplanted the jazzier social style from which it originated, rendering the dance somewhat more staid in perception than is necessarily true to its essential spirit and fairly adaptable rhythm.

To establish some footing in what's currently understood by a social but still fairly formalized approach to foxtrot, this tutorial provides a quick and clear visual breakdown of the basics:


Confusing matters slightly, slow foxtrot may be synonymous with foxtrot overall -- as separate from quickstep, originally a variant of the dance -- or may refer to a specific subgenre of foxtrot. The ISU, for its part, has distinguished between the two, and while a quicker-paced foxtrot ruled the day this season and in others (as demonstrated in 2001 by Marina Anissina & Gwendal Peizerat) most original dances from the 2004-05 season utilized the slow rhythm, including -- and pay attention -- this one from then-juniors (and national seniors) Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, a particularly solid demonstration of hold-heavy foxtrot.

And from the history page linked above, let's also take a moment to note the described "theatricality" of an American take on the form -- and that the couples covered in the previous entry here all utilized a foxtrot rhythm in their season SDs.

And while most teams this past season did incorporate the foxtrot, as suggested by those theatrical examples and many others, fewer programs focused in on a more traditional ballroom-oriented interpretation. This dance from Maia & Alex Shibutani is, however, one of the clearer, playing to the team's strengths:


The slow-slow-quick-quick pattern is discernible here, especially at the top of each foxtrot segment; the choreography from 0:34-0:38 is a little like a promenade. The sense of lilt is apparent in their second foxtrot section particularly, with a notion of rise and fall, if less of sway.

But least common of all was reference to foxtrot's initial roots, and to explore those, let's first set the stage with a look at the real thing in the 1920s and 1930s. The comparison is instructive; while the 1920s clip retains a jazzy sensibility, that of the 1930s suggests a smoother, more standard ballroom interpretation:



A few teams elected to call back to that early-mid-century feel, though in varying degrees of faithfulness to actual dance movement. The Charleston-inspired short dance from Danielle O'Brien and Gregory Merriman nicely utilizes its middle foxtrot rhythm (beginning at 1:55) in terms of bounce and sway, though the openness of hold outside of the midline step sequence distances it from its floor forebear:


And after their youthful take on the ballroom-based slow foxtrot, Virtue and Moir elected to travel the jazz club route with this Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong program, which wraps its quickstep middle with two foxtrot sections:


Again, the concern is more general feeling than specific translation, but the in-hold moments present something like a heightened conception of the real thing, performance more than a direct presentation, particularly with several early sequences, and the bulk of the "Cheek to Cheek" section, marked by rise and fall but also a quite nonstandard degree of flash. But compare also the interplay of the no-touch midline step sequence to the responsive steps of the traditional dance, with the step-back/step-forward slow-quick rhythm suggested a bit by the patterns and rhythms carved out as one partner seems to move more in reaction to the other than out of any simple choreographic scheme. The attitude of reaction and response is what grounds the rise and fall here.

Among the spectrum of fundamental dance styles, foxtrot poses more difficulty than most in its move to the ice -- its composition so rooted in actions so incompatible with both the physics of skating and the requirements of competition that isolated elements and rhythms must take precedence here. But that flexibility of tempo and rhythm also makes its application as a secondary rhythm -- an addition to a quickstep or waltz or other standard ballroom form -- certainly points to its overwhelming popularity of use. The result, though, is a style that can lose its identity in ice dance form; those references, then, to its primary roots are all the more unique.