Dancing on ice: the epitome of grace and skill
The world of ice dancing had some good news recently. The Canadian ice dance duo of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who set the competition on fire at the 2010 Vancouver Games with their glittering golden moves, took to the track this month at the Skate Canada Autumn Classic International. This is their first performance together in almost two and a half years; The last time they skated they won the silver medal at the 2014 Sochi Games in Russia. And unsurprisingly, their score of 77.2 points in the Short Dance was well ahead of the Danish couple who finished second.
However, the free dance portion of the competition is still ahead.
Ice dancing is a popular sport that is part of the discipline of figure skating; it became an official Olympic sport in 1976. As the term suggests, the routine involves a male and female couple performing rhythmic dance moves and twists to a piece of music. There are strict requirements for evaluating performance, such as no jumping or throwing and no separation beyond the length of two arms.
Dancing on ice is very different from figure skating, in that the skaters’ skills focus on jumps and spins and the precision of their footwork. This is one of the reasons why the Artistic Director of Ice Dance International, a professional company that performs all over the world, wishes to move the activity of ‘sport’ to that of ‘art’. Ice Dancing is all about the expansive power and speed, flow and flight and design that we can see on ice and is therefore more of an art than a sporting discipline.
In the 1930s, many elements of what are known as compulsory dances comprised movements developed by Great Britain’s ice dances. Since joining the World Championship in 1952, British teams have won twelve of the first sixteen world championships. The movements back then were more drawn towards an upright car and angular movements. However, starting in the 1960s, when more ice dances from Europe began to join in, a new trend began to emerge in dance moves involving more upper body movement and greater speed.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet dancers took center stage through their more theatrical styles based on elements of ballet that emphasized extended line and speed rather than difficult footwork. The Russian couple of Lyudmila Pakhomova and Aleksandr Gorshkov won the first international title when Dancing became an official medal event.
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