Blues on Ice

by Jacquelyn Thayer

Let it be clear: blues in competitive figure skating can in no way truly be equated to blues the form of social dance. Even the most musically nuanced ice dancers are dancing in blades on an ice surface; they are obligated to incorporate a number of required technical elements, including lifts and separated sections very unlikely to be found in your most standard blues dance; and they are, most detrimentally, held to quite strict requirements musically and rhythmically. The slow, pulsing music suitable to a social floor will not pass muster in this skating season, where teams must perform their three-minute short dance to “blues” music with a BPM of 88 — and worse still, pair it with one of two other styles, swing (a broad enough category, by the skating rulebook, to include even disco — a story for another issue) or hip hop.

Yes, this is much for a blues purist to take in. The faintest of heart might avert their eyes before pondering ice dance’s Midnight Blues compulsory pattern — the set of figures and holds, composed in the 1930s and well away from the period’s vernacular scene, that comprise the blues these skaters are executing. Deep knee bend and an emphasis on connection between partners will be your closest correlating components, but fundamentally, it’s best to take blues on ice as another form of blues fusion — writ large.

Here’s a look at how four ice dance teams tackled their mission — managing, in the end, to present a personally representative approach to blues itself while connecting it to a larger stylistic tradition.

Swing

Given both the roots of blues and its contemporary role in the Lindy scene, the most faithful approach is the traditional swing path. And while perhaps under the radar compared with the work of more decorated compatriots, young U.S. senior dance team Karina Manta and Joe Johnson have offered up one of the more enjoyably authentic takes on the style, highlighting some recognizable swing movement on the heels of a gentle blues.

Choreographer (and 1984 Olympic champion ice dancer) Christopher Dean brought his own knowledge of vintage vernacular to the process, along with preparing the team through video references. “We spent a lot of time on YouTube as a group, trying to find the style of blues that suited our style best, and settled on a more vintage, sweet approach,” said Johnson.

After an early brush with “Dream a Little Dream” — which they quickly determined lent their blues too much of a foxtrot feel — the team selected Louis Armstrong’s “La Vie en Rose” for a light but appropriately bluesy approach. “I think there are a few different ways to approach the blues style,” said Manta. “We decided to take a route that is a bit more playful, but still embodies the somewhat languid and sultry movement often associated with blues. With the swing, I think a lot of the style is reflected in quick, intricate partnering movements, and dynamic expression. With both styles a huge key is displaying a connection between each other as partners.”

And though pairing together two distinctive styles presents its risks, Manta and Johnson found the challenge an opportunity.

“We think the contrast can make a program fairly dynamic, and we’ve really worked to pair the two in a way that allows the program to build to complement each style,” said Johnson. “We start with our blues, and finish with the swing piece; and we searched to find pieces that make sense with one another.”

Jazz

With most competitors opting to turn the ice to the social dance floor, Canadians Alexandra Paul and Mitch Islam, who have since retired from competitive skating, took the more stylized approach of stage jazz, the dressed-up and formalized descendant of a vernacular style. Upon selecting Gwen Verdon and company’s rendition of “Big Spender” for their blues, here, too, video proved fruitful.

“We really enjoyed watching [Bob] Fosse’s Sweet Charity Broadway production of ‘Big Spender,’” said Islam. “While the choreography itself hasn’t any cut-and-paste Fosse movements, the inspiration came from the intention his dancers have throughout. The piece exudes a sultry, sexy confidence, and that is definitely something we want[ed] to bring to the program.”

Feeling that sultriness, and a sense of sophistication, were central to the Midnight Blues, the couple’s next task was to find a suitable swing capper. With choreographer Romain Haguenauer, they settled on Big Band staple “Sing, Sing, Sing” for their up-tempo secondary selection while maintaining an outward-projecting theatrical approach — the “upbeat, fun, let-loose” portion affording the chance for some fast footwork and a dynamic finish.

With the mid-season announcement of their retirement in December — and an ill-timed injury a month prior that meant withdrawal from what would have been their last competition — the number had only limited time to develop, skated at two events in the fall. But in a brief lifespan, the idiosyncratically jazzy take on blues accomplished its aim.

“As with any program, the goal is to adapt to the particular style in a way that reflects who you are as a performer, while still respecting the original genre,” said Islam. “You want people to recognize what type of style you have taken on, but you want to bring some of your own original flair.”

Hip Hop

Many teams this year, however, have opted not for vintage blues, but blues of the future — pairing it with one of the present era’s most fundamental street styles, hip hop, for a modern take, an experiment that can present mixed results between the difficulties of blending two seemingly disparate musical styles and representing a staccato, stationary style on ice.

The trick, musically, is to find the shared root. If hip hop and rap arise from the soul and funk of the ‘60s and ‘70s, so too was that style simply a popular offshoot of more traditional blues and jazz. U.S. dancers Kaitlin Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker have laid this heritage bare with a program that fluidly melds Michael Buble’s rendition of Nina Simone classic “Feeling Good” with Flo Rida’s rap remix “How I Feel,” which samples and builds on Simone’s number while fitting within the pitch of Buble’s.

It was a concept originally designed for a show program, before the announcement of this season’s program requirements altered the team’s plan.

“[Kaitlin] originally found it and thought it would be really cool just from an audience perspective,” said Baker. Though Buble’s “Feeling Good” has become a standard of 2010s figure skating, “what would make it fresh and new is finding something that worked with it, and lo and behold, she found this song which had not only hip hop nuances but also the Nina Simone version in the background,” he continued.

To prepare for the blues itself, the couple focused on basic skating drills, emphasizing deep edges and deep knee bend — key components of the style on ice. Hip hop demanded a little more focus off the ice.

“We started off watching a lot of videos and kind of learning dancing tutorials and just spending evenings in our studio in our rink working it on ourselves, just to get comfortable with the style,” said Hawayek. The two also worked with dancers Benji Schwimmer and Serge Onik, who brought experience within both ballroom and hip hop.

Given the broad range of street and studio dances classified as hip hop, ranging from breaking to jookin, it was also a task to narrow down what would translate best to a program aimed at both judges and live and at-home audiences. Something like krump, suggested Baker, could be within their capacity as dancers, but its impact might be diluted given the team’s slighter physical stature.

“Once we started playing with different styles off the ice, then we brought it onto the ice and videoed it from different angles and saw what appeared and what kind of got lost from a smaller size in a big arena, and we decided from there which styles we wanted to incorporate,” said Hawayek. “It’s just like the broad genre of hip hop and then from there we make it our own.”

It’s also a matter of marrying distinctive stylistic demands, one dance inward, another outward.

“For blues, I think the main point that you want to thrive off of is connection, but there’s so many different kinds of connection, whether it’s the smallest nuance of a touch or the way you look at someone,” said Hawayek. “And then hip hop, I think it’s more of just an inner feeling — you have to be very grounded and kind of have that inner swag, as funny as it sounds for a figure skater to say that because we’re about as proper as it comes. But we really need to find that grungy side and get into the ice, and also just project. It’s a crowd-appealing thing; you want to see people having fun and really throwing that energy, bouncing it back to them, and having just like this constant play between the two of you.”

Prince

But one of the most distinctive takes on blues/hip hop fusion has come from the team possessing the broadest repertoire in the contemporary ice dance field: 2010 Olympic champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who this fall returned to competition after a two-season hiatus following the Sochi Games. In nine seasons of senior-level competition stretching back to 2006, the couple have tackled styles like modern dance, Latin ballroom and musical theatre with full commitment to authenticity. Their goal in paying tribute to both an iconic musician in Prince — and a necessarily unique style of movement — was no less.

The work began with Montreal-based hip hop dancer Samuel Chouinard, with whom they’d previously worked for show programs. “Over the years, we’ve done various styles of hip hop,” said Virtue. “And that was deliberate because we wanted to test how different types of hip hop transferred onto the ice and how they worked for us.”

With Prince’s popular “Kiss” selected as an energetic way to open the three-song program, they went to work with Chouinard, who presented the team with some unorthodox combinations.

“I was surprised to see waacking being one of the choices, but pleasantly surprised, because I think it is unexpected,” said Virtue. Indeed, the opening moments highlight the sharp style, with nods in the section as well to other club-derived dances like vogueing. “It’s interesting to sort of bring the femininity and the masculinity and that mixture of both that Prince embodied so well. I think that particular style of dance is well-suited to Prince and just the sort of style he had in general. We wanted to sort of find that fine line of that strength and whimsy.”

Ballroom coach Ginette Cournoyer was tasked with honing the team’s blues, set to the more obscure “5 Women” — the program as a whole concludes with a soaring riff of “Purple Rain” — while coach and choreographer Marie-France Dubreuil was the “glue” responsible for uniting the program into a cohesive whole.

“[The styles] are very different and it is a challenge, for sure, to try and mix those two together,” said Moir. “But we tried to welcome that challenge, and I think for us it’s a little bit easier because at least it’s the same artist. So, you know, we’re trying to do a little bit of a tribute to Prince and if anything, it just shows his fabulous range of how freaking talented he was — he could just go from one thing and then quickly to something completely different.”

Surprisingly, over the team’s twenty-year tenure together, they’ve only tackled blues in a significant way once previously — in the Midnight Blues compulsory dance, as teenagers and junior-level skaters. Approaching it anew, as adults tasked with a choreographic exercise, means more than just mature expression or smoother execution.

“With the technical side of the pattern dance and the partial step sequence, it’s working around that because they’re worth so many points and it’s really hard to incorporate different position holds and things with the required rules,” said Virtue. So I think that will grow and evolve as the season progresses, but it’s just finding that balance, trying to make the technical side of things interesting.”

It’s a concern that transcends blues or any genre of hip hop.

“Prince was all about glamour, right, and he made a statement no matter what he did, but he brought such elegance and class to it,” continued Virtue. “So, you know, it’s finding that edge of pushing the boundaries and the shock value with the classic, timeless sort of iconic poses and movements and sound.”

Conclusion

For as far afield as skated blues and its near — or distant — vernacular styles may stray technically from the original dance, Baker posits that it also offers up its own multitude of varieties — a subgenre of a style, in its way.

“There’s so many different kinds of blues,” he said. “There’s [Maia and Alex] Shibutanis’ blues” — another hip hop variant, set to a specially-crafted Frank Sinatra and Jay Z mashup — “which is not sexy because they’re brother and sister, but it’s very classical blues. The blues dance can be just a slinky dance done by two people. I think we’re trying to find more of the youthfulness and the sexiness between ourselves with it.”

And these distilled interpretations, whether sultry, sweet or smooth, can in their own way call back to the heart of a root style.

 
For more from Jacquelyn on skating, visit Two for the Ice and follow on Twitter at @twofortheice