How can skaters bring emotion to a blade? How does their musicality play into a seemingly simple essence of motion? A skater moves forward and backward on the inside or outside edge of a blade. If, in pairs and singles skating, it seems like the air is increasingly being sucked out of routines to make room for more jumps - it’s worse when they’re crammed into the second half in order to score more points - ice dance pushes skating to a more poetic place. Arms lengthen from the back with fingers that grow along with them. Its power is rooted in a blade’s deep etchings, the angle of plush knee bends and, despite those awkward boots, toes that point and extend the length of a leg to create fluent line. In ice dance, there are no lifts above the head, no heroic jumps. They aren’t merely ice dancers: They dance on the ice, showing how it’s capable of becoming a living canvas, one that curves toward the skater as the skater curves back into it. It is, though, extraordinary in its own right and can possess the quiet sophistication, musicality and nuance of dance.
I’ll never tire of their skill - their consummate speed and control - but this year, as they swept across the ice with gaping mouths to music from the “Moulin Rouge” soundtrack, they ran my red light.
Moir, this season’s sentimental favorites - they won silver four years ago and reunited for what was likely their last stab at the gold - burn with a seething rapture that has become performative, distractingly so. (And I know that reading this, they are relieved.) I couldn’t have skated to that with one of my brothers.
#Musicality tessa virtue free#
But when they pressed together in head-to-toe camel spins - each holding onto the other’s extended free leg and waist to the lyric “Para-para-paradise” - it gave me pause. This American brother and sister, revered for their precision and joie de vivre, are elite athletes. I still can’t wrap my head around the decision by Maia and Alex Shibutani, who won the bronze medal, to skate to Coldplay’s sensual “Paradise.” But the art of self-expression can be questionable, too.
#Musicality tessa virtue series#
Self-expression is as worthy as a successfully executed twizzle sequence - a series of multirotational turns on one foot. While examples of gorgeous skaters abound in singles and pairs skating, ice dancing is a different beast. It’s a window into another space and time: eerie, quiet, floating. Suddenly, a competition is a conduit for more than skating. Cizeron’s did, it is just as ethereal as ballet. When a free dance program shows two bodies moving as one, as Ms. But as a dance critic, I judge skating by different rules, and to me, no team, gold medal or not, matches the artistry of Ms. Skating, especially on the Olympic level, is a sport with a mystifying judging system. This wardrobe glitch cost the pair points and put them behind the Canadians going into the free dance. But as their skate continued, her breast was briefly exposed. As she explained afterward, there was nothing left for her to do but pray. Papadakis’s halter dress became unfastened. The back story, which everyone probably knows by now, is that near the start of the French pair’s short dance on Sunday, the top of Ms. On Monday night, the French team of Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron took the silver medal while Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada won the gold. The Olympics ice dancing competition came down to a dress.
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