- styled

You realize of course that what makes a skating program stylish has a lot more to do with the mode of execution than simply what elements your program contains. In fact I'd argue that any particular element in and of itself is not more stylish than any other element: a stag jump and a Bielman are moves that can both look either amazing or crappy, depending.

Okay so perhaps a Bielman has greater *potential* for stylish embellishment. This is because if you break the move down into quantum atoms, it has more moving parts.

First you lead into it with your pre-entry spin. Then calf up, hand drop, skate grasp. Then a pull upward, other hand grasp, more upward pull while spinning. Then spinning in final posture, added embellishment, and graceful exit. So watch this video.

There you go, what did you see? Of course, a Bielman. Now watch this one.

Okay, same element really, yes? But styled very very differently. Denise has something to say with her move, her approach is deliberate and gentle, she wants to use the move as a vehicle for expression on entry, spinup, and graceful exit.

She's not just doing a Bielman.

- master

Folks who skate nationally and then retire from competing, but who then keep on skating into their adult years, are an interesting bunch to watch.

Some of what makes them captivating is that they have many quiet and intense experiences that they relive through their skating. Some of it is that they are a bit of a throwback to an older era, when the sport itself was different.

More interesting is that, if they so desire, with a flick of the skate blade they can show you more suave, more grace, or more class than most everyone else at the rink.

A rink will often allow for a flight of Master level skaters at an exhibition. If you can by all means stick around to watch: you won't learn any new elements this way, but you'll learn some things that are far more important.

- literal

Skating with expressive style to a musical piece is a good trick; staying stylish when the background contains lyrics is even more of a challenge.

I'd prefer that you didn't, but if you absolutely must skate to music with lyrics, please avoid running the unfortunate risk of taking the words too literally. Just because the lyrics say "breaking my heart" doesn't mean that you have to clutch your chest, seriously.

Although the music usually gets written as an accompaniment to the lyrics, if we wanted you to skate to the words alone we would ask you to skate solely to spoken poetry.

What makes music magical beyond the lyrics *is* the music. The music is the showy sizzle, the lyrics are the poetic scaffolding.

That rather sets the stage for what we are asking: use the higher level, the music, as the framework upon which to build your performance. The lyrics are still there, so don't controvert their meaning. But it's a nobler cause to skate to the feelings of the music.

And when the lyrics say "he shot her" don't cock your fingers into a pretend gun to shoot. Seriously.

- style two

In an earlier post I wrote about skating "style" but upon further reflection that post seems to be more reflective than proactive: it says what makes style and what you should avoid, but it doesn't really give specific guidance for developing your own flair.  So forthwith let's dive into the more positive and generative bezels of obtaining and exhibiting a style.

First the obvious: style is something that you deliberately (and half subconsciously) cultivate. To be able to express it, you first have to be able to recognize it. Some of this inclination may be a hereditary capability to keenly observe the subtleties of movement, fashion, color, and rhythm. Even so, early artistic training can influence a young child to develop sharper artistic sensitivities. The point is not to get your two year old to skate, but rather to show them colorful and nicely designed books, furniture, buildings, artwork, rhythmic music, and flowers. A strong and varied visual cortex may be positively leveraged toward other stylish ends later.

Naturally many young kids watch champion elite skaters on TV and think "oooh I want to look like that," but a person can pick up stylish movements and expressive traits from many other venues besides televised competitions. Cultivating a variety of sources for stylish movement is an important part of broadening your body awareness and projecting style to an audience. Watching people doing ballet, dance (in all its forms), and fashion shows are all excellent sources for movement studies. You must be a keen observer of how people carry themselves, pose, move, and how they project "attitude."

I can't overly stress the importance of variety. At some of the higher end rinks I visit all of the accomplished club skaters are intensely serious and everyone seems to be doing the same moves. It's as if nobody wants to stand out as different or express intense individuality, funk, or eccentricity. This is so wrong, and it kills the fun in the sport. If you are spending so much time at the rink that you are missing out on other cultural activities then you are doing it wrong.

Notwithstanding observing others, you must also be a keen observer of yourself. There is no substitute for watching videos of your own program during practice. Yes you know how it feels, but you need to see how it appears to the judges and people in the audience. Have mom video your practice programs and watch them during a break or on the drive home.

Exactly copying somebody else's attitude won't precisely work: you quickly find that everyone's specific body mechanics and motions are unique to themselves. The trick is to generalize or simplify the motion you like seeing in others and then embellishing it to match your own physical mechanics and capabilities.

As you age into your sport you will find different styles more to your liking than others. Tastes are dynamic: some of the changes are brought about by variations in outside culture and some by your own physical growth and change of mechanics. Observing other's style and reviewing your own is a constant process of reevaluation.

Skating style is a delicate balance between form and concept. Its goal is beauty, grace, balance, and strength, but its creative edge comes from bursting expectations by juxtaposing new materials over old tropes. You don't want to look like somebody else: you want to look like yourself.

(with a shoutout for the spark of this idea to Vogue magazine May 2015)

- grlz

So you see there are the skategirls, and then there are the skategrlz. The skategirls are soft and beautiful and hopeful, have doting parents and new tights, new soakers, and a perfectly clean club warmup sweatshirt with added sparkly crystals, and they're at the rink as much as possible to be the best skaters they can be. The skategrlz are tough as nails, have tape on their boots, a colorful funky warmup that they found in a thrift store, and they go to the rink as much as possible to get away from school and home. Both the girls and the grlz skate the bejeebers out of themselves and fall often enough on the hard ice to get calloused hips. They both curse their frustrations.

To the skategirls each additional element is increasingly unfair, and since somebody else in the freestyle can land it so easily, naturally even, it is sooo frustrating. They persevere though, and realize that enough practice likely can catch up with natural talent. To the skategrlz each additional element is just another experience to conquer, and life is frustrating enough already so what's one more brick on the pile? And who knows... they may have the correct body build and natural talent for this move so it's about time they got lucky.

When skatergirls land a tough move it's all smiles and sparklies and thanks so much for the help coach and god bless my parents (and I knew if I practiced this long enough I could nail it). When skatergrlz land a tough move it's hot damn that felt so good (did you see that hockey guy?) and this will show them what I'm made of.

After many years of skating the girls and the grlz slowly migrate toward each other. The girls recognize fate or genetics prevents some things, and start to accept that life's road is bumpy for everyone. The grlz start to appreciate the politeness and fashion sense absorbed from their peers as it pays off in other ways in their life.

- transition

Are your transitions just how you get from one element to the next? Or are your elements those pieces of the requirements that you squeeze in-between your transitions? Most likely (and especially for a beginning skater) it's the former: the transitions are how you get from element 1 to element 2.

For the artistic expression of a musical piece however this presents somewhat of an issue, springing from the culture of how skating is taught. You learn a scratch spin, you learn a waltz jump, you learn a toe loop. Then you glue them all together with some transitions in cadence with your music. When it comes time to put together your program you and your coach think "what is a good move to do with the music /here/" and then the next, et cetera. So your program ends up as a bunch of separate moves glued together.

Ideally for the music however, the transitions and the elements blend together into an expressive piece of movement. The transitions can have an underlying thematic element to themselves. The can suggest a growing sense of urgency, or a crescendoing of artistic complexity. Or you can present the transitions as a consistent counterpoint to the mood within the elements. The transitions can be suggestive of how the elements might relate to one another. Your transitions can create an illusion of place, a sense of theme that ties into a storyline of the music. Transitions can even be suggestive of one another, playing off of each other.

When you build a program from the other end, from the point of view of "flow," certain moves will more naturally flow into others. Then the transitions serve a more practical purpose. They help you "set up" for your next element, in terms of body position, momentum, and posture. They also provide signaling to the audience as to where you're heading, both in terms of what is coming up in the next element but also where you are leading them emotionally through your theme. You can also view your transitions as the punctuation, the parenthesis that highlight or otherwise set apart your elements (you can use this approach gently but if you overdo it it quickly becomes rather crass).

Your transitions shouldn't be such a big mishmash of variety to confuse the audience. You want to establish some baseline for a sense of place or style. You should manage the beat (or pulse), accent (or stress), and tempo (or pace) of your transitions to avoid a random affair. You also need to consider the perspective of the audience viewing your transitions: who are you playing to? Is it bad form to play to both sides of the rink?

In whole, your transitions serve as a binding and connecting mechanism that expresses a theme. Even though your transitions seem to be interspersed amongst your elements (or vice versa) they get perceived as a continuous expression of a dynamically planned flow. It is even possible for the net effect of your transitions to have a storyline and a gentle reveal unto themselves.

That's not to say that all of your transitionsal patterns should be alike. Keep a theme within a certain program, but it's perfectly fine (and perhaps even more professional) to use entirely different thematic transitions in each of your separate programs.

- choreography

May I relate my opinions about choreography? Your coach shares her ideas, or if you've been competing a while then you employ a separate choreographer. Fine. Briefly suspend your preconceptions to contemplate these feelings from a long-time skate parent and audience member who has admired thousands of hours of figure skating. This is the eloquence us folks in the stands yearn for, the skating we desire expressively from your performance. This is the reason we watch you skate.

Absolutely, please express yourself! Choose music that moves and touches your soul, and then expound upon those feelings. Also though be the angel that fosters those feelings in the audience. Your performance should flow from your heart but also from our hearts.

Be flexible about the interpretation: let your personality shine through! We want your read on the music and your insight about these feelings. I don't like coyness or melodrama: just present your own honest personality. Still though we'd prefer some boundaries: don't mock the music, the lyrics, the audience, or the skating. Be a performance artist and stop being a show-off.

If you choose a piece with lyrics, primarily skate the meaning of the lyrics first and then skate the feeling of the music secondarily. Avoid a piece with a chorus of more than two occurrences (as this reduces your originality).

Speaking of that, show some ingenuity! Try a new leg or arm sweep, clap your hands, stomp a foot, wiggle your shoulders. Once is interesting. The second time you use the gesture for emphasis, but if you dare repeat it a third time then it is no longer cute but rather boring me to death.

Stay on the music... don't lag a half beat behind it and don't telegraph your move a half beat ahead either.

Does your program tell a story? It should have a lead in, build to a climax, and then finish gracefully or with a touch of class. Strive for a graceful overall presentation (or if you're a guy aim for a classy presentation).

And finally, keep us entranced. Keep me hypnotized throughout your program without distracting thoughts or fallouts. When you finish I should have that shocking feeling of rediscovering myself in an audience of hundreds of people, where moments before I was your virtual partner on the ice.

Personality, Expressiveness, Lyrics treatment, Appropriateness, Novelty, Ingenuity, Timing, a Full story, Grace (or class for a man), Hypnotism. Is all that too much to ask from your choreography? Exactly.

- accessorized

It's not unusual to bring along an accessory to enhance a dramatic skating program. A hat (top or beret), a scarf (or two), a cane (or a baton), an umbrella (or a parasol), a twirly ribbon, an Asian silk folding hand fan, a fake microphone (or a megaphone), I've seen all of these. Sometimes it seems that the skater brought the prop along just to support the mood already established with the theme of the music, but I've seen a couple of devices that when used actually do add a bit of glamour or some other interesting flavor to a skater's elements.

I can't say though that skating with an umbrella or parasol adds that much to the panache of your performance. Unless you can manage to spin it in the opposite direction over your head as you execute a fast spin (and good luck with that) a parasol just doesn't have much graceful glamor to it.  Plus skating with an open umbrella seems like a particularly difficult task, as the air pressure provides such uneven resistance depending on your direction and the umbrella's tilt.

Skating with a cane or baton is easy enough, and a good little trick is to attach a leather band to the handle to make it easier to twirl. If you're going to carry a cane about the rink then really use it though!  Tap it here and there, twirl it some, use it as a pivot in a move. Please though don't throw it into the air to catch it. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've seen the timing on a program royally screwed up by a dropped baton. And even if you can toss and catch it 90 percent of the time during freestyle, your chances are only about 30 percent during the competition. And if you set it down for some other elements just be sure that you don't lose it in the process -- back gliding over a dropped cane can result in a fairly serious injury!

Many times I've seen somebody skate with one or two small collapsible accordion silk hand fans. You know, the kinds with drawings of Asian bamboo or flowers or dragons. Fans add quite a bit of expressiveness but it takes a bit of practice to control expanding and collapsing them effectively, especially when you're on the move. They are also easy enough to tuck into an elastic band to secure them in place when you want them hidden (stage trick: Velcro).

Skating with hand-held scarves or gauzy trailing things can create some nice visual effects (you know what I mean, those ribbons of lightweight floaty fabric that you hold in your hands or tie to your wrists).  I'm not talking about the ribbon that gymnasts are fond of using for their routine, a long narrow tape on a stick. Although you can use one of those too if you'd like. The real issue with skating with a gymnasts ribbon is that to be effective you really need to keep it moving the entire time, as (aside from dropping it on the ice) there's no convenient way to get the thing out of the way. So that means if you use one, your entire routine is pretty much about the ribbon.

Most popular though seems to be ribbons or swaths of gauzy fabric, but these though aren't without their own problems.  Solid props are much better behaved as they go where you place them; anything with fabric though tends to have a mind of its own.  This is especially a problem on any kind of spin. I was at one event where a skater managed to unintentionally wrap a rather wide chiffon around her head during a spin, and then had to grapple it away before moving onward.  If you're going to skate with something gossamer you need to plan ahead for every spin and jump and decide how you're going to secure the thing, either with some attention to wrapping it around a body part, temporarily scrunching it, releasing it for later, or holding it far enough away that it doesn't become an issue.

Finally, one of the nicer effects I've seen is to attach a somewhat wider swath of chiffon to the tines of a fan.  That way you get a more controlled and sustained width of fabric fluttering about. Again though this makes stowing it away a bit of an issue.

Whatever prop you use, plan the trajectory of its use carefully across the length of your program, and be sure to use it in a way that really adds value to what you're trying to present.

- hands

Skating embraces pretty much your entire mind and body. During practice the physical focus is on your legs, ankles, feet, and body core; during program development your focus likely switches to the mental aspects such as timing, expressiveness, flow, and grace.  Well and trying to remember how the whole thing fits together. You probably spend most of your time though primarily thinking about your feet, ankles, boots, blades, and everything down at that end. Okay fine.

So what about those extremities three quarters of the way up that stick out to your sides? Hands! What do they have to do with skating? Can you visualize any other sport that is *less* dependent on hands? Okay, soccer. Anything else? Nope. And yet your hands /do/ play a role in figure skating, mostly for expressiveness and grace.

If feet are the sport's skill, then hands are its suave. And like shoes and socks, skill and grace compliment each other so significantly that it's bombastic to have one without the other. When you have to watch an athletically accomplished skater perform a routine without any thought about her hands it's like catching a Ferrari race down the street caked in mud. You don't have the whole package until you've got the hands.

Hands and feet operate in different universes on different time scales.  Much like a pianist plays a separate rhythm with the left and right hands, your feet and hands need to be able to operate independently. Whereas the feet become fully fixated on the variable speed execution of elements, the hands need to flow continuously throughout the expressiveness of your program's music. It's a left brain right brain sort of thing. Or maybe a front brain back brain sort of thing.

Hands should portray the story of the music. A fine line though separates telling the story from overselling it. Hand use in skating is like that Ferrari design: sure it needs to be both impressive and well thought through, but the suggestion of expense is better than outlandishness. No need for diamonds around the license plate on your Ferrari, sweetie. And with your hands the key concept is to be symbolic rather than to overtly describe.

Unless you are deliberately striving to be outrageously over-the-top, you want your fashionable hands to be appropriately understated. Yet as in choosing the car you drive, how you present your hands may depend strongly on your personal viewpoints and yield for whether you favor a demure versus a sparkling approach. I've always felt you should cultivate somewhat lyrical hands, but not necessarily hula-Hawaiian expressive. Your target should be slightly less than fully lyrical hands.

Finally, suggestiveness works best when unbroken. Continuous hand fluidity is quite a challenge, but it demonstrates real polish if you can retain your hand postures between elements and upon exits. A practiced skater lets her hands flow continuously sub-lyrically throughout her whole story.

- palms

Okay one last niggling concern about those parts of your body that don't actually skate: the palms of your hands. I'll accept three positions for your palms while stroking (when you aren't otherwise moving your hands about). Palms down, palms up, or palms forward. Each position expresses something different, yet most of the skaters I watch choose the simple default, palms down.

Palms down is like a plane flying, or a bird soaring. Good for when you want to describe "speediness" or a quiet smoothness. They are also probably easier to manage when you are still working up your shoulder strength. Palms forward (with feather fingers naturally) is like you are catching the wind, trailing a bouquet of colorful streamers. Palms up, the most difficult of the three, is a celebratory showing, carrying two golden orbs, a "ta da."

When you are stroking about the rink for your program take a few moments to consider your palms; what is the music trying to express here? Your palms should match.

Palms in a spin are really a great source for creativity. You can slice the air, you can tangle the wind, you can lift and arise, plus any combination of these. If you're very careful you can rhythmically flutter. Don't feel that you have to constrain yourself to a palm position frozen by the axis of your spin: you can slowly move your palms from one position to another.

Since jumps tend to already push the limits of the possible, palm expressiveness in a jump nowadays is rather an extravagant bit of glamour. If you back off a notch on your rotations however you can then inject some sparkle with your palms. This is easiest on the exit but if you're very careful you can meld them into your takeoff or even your apex. Don't get too crazy here. . . any palm expressiveness at all on a jump is certainly enough.

Edges, stroking, face thoughts, takeoff, timing, grace, arm movements, fingers, palms. Geesh is that enough to think about on the ice? Ya think?

- style

How do you learn new elements and still develop a style of your own? Surely it's easiest to learn by watching another skater as she performs a move, ask your coach to teach you the technical execution, and then strive to copy them. When most of the skaters follow this course it leads to a "fashion," whether that be a Bielman or a butt-up spin. (Sidenote: I never saw butt-up until a couple years ago and now half the gals try it. You know what? It look farcical: it turns you into a paper clip. Please don't do this move).

Mimicking an elite move is different though from replicating a style. Physics fairly limits the full set of possible elements, so mirroring an elite move isn't necessarily unoriginal. When you try to imitate somebody else's style however you come off as "phony" -- you need to express your own personal style.

To some extent, style is what you tack on top of a foundational move. Additionally though you reflect your style in the type of music you choose, the programs you like to skate, the fluidity of your movements, the projection of your attitude, and your treatment of fellow skaters.

I've seen skaters express a full range of personalities using their arms, their footwork, hand embellishments, their carriage, facial expressions, costume, and attitude -- they can be unselfish, silly, eager, rustic, coy, daring, decorous, droll, demure, mirthful, virtuous, stimulating, wise, elegant, and winsome (to name just a few traits).

Your skating style is more a reflection of your personality combined with methods that you've developed for how to express it.

You should strive to make each move your own. Watch for variety and allow novelty to impress you when you happen across something new to your eyes. The goal however is not to mirror the elites' style: it's to be graceful, inventive, and to express your own spirit.

(repost)

- bouncy

Yesterday I floated by the public session at the Westfield UTC rink in San Diego (yeah a rink mezzanined below a mall's food court) and sure enough amongst the weekend noobs hugging the boards an actual nine year old Skater with a Coach on ice was polishing her double Axel. Although still somewhat inconsistent her talents were immediately obvious: she had that magical combination of bubbly personality with tight center of gravity control. After ten minutes of Axel she switched to practicing her flying camel.

I smiled to myself while thinking Ah someday a national competitor. Yet as I watched her skate her set-ups and non jumps with their implied stylistic flourishes I also recognized her largest challenge. And it's not just hers. . . this seems to be the toughest sub-component for nearly all competing skaters. Managing the vertical bounce.

Grace derives from many components, most of them inherited traits of demeanor and personality. Yet a good solid thirty percent or so of gracefulness is actually a physical spoof -- how you manifest your awareness of carriage. I recall a certain children's story where the aspiring princess walks about balancing a book on her head; it's sort of like this. In skating however the dynamics of movement require a more complicated management of "flow."

Novice skaters manage this in one physical dimension: sideways. They work on consistent shudder control. More advanced skaters add the second physical dimension, accelerative smoothness: they strive for "seamlessness." Since a sheet of ice is only two dimensional one would think that handling velocity and shimmy should be sufficient. Counterintuitively though the flatness of the ice tends to enhance the contrast to the third dimension you travel, your vertical movements.

I've seen skaters manage this vertical 3rd dimension to various ends. Some treat it as irrelevant, as they randomly bounce around the rink. Others track it on the small scale, thinking in terms of softness and transitions. Some handle it dogmatically, keeping their center exactly at a fixed height while somewhat boringly executing a flattened pattern.

The third dimension should have a studied dynamism, a path that is purposeful and yet sublime. It should be like the movements of a swans neck. The third dimension should be gently managed as its own story.

This is how you separate the competitors from the pros.

- ether

Practice ice has an interesting dynamic -- I don't mean the mental tete-a-tete between the skaters nor the telekinetics between a coach, her student, and the parent (those are also intriguing though).

The deeply intense dynamic is between a skater and her art and craft. Does she skate the physics, or does she skate the ether of the crowd? Perhaps she sways between one and the other.

A skater has a few different ways to practice stylistically. In one mode she expounds a physical tenor; although she can't see herself in real time she "feels" the moves deductively. Another method is to play to the love of her rink friends: how does this look? You see a lot of this interplay (and politics) during a practice session.

The most interesting method though plays to the ether of the program music and the love from a future audience. When you observe a skater practicing in this mode it's almost like watching somebody who has lost touch with their present world and surroundings. She is somewhere out in a world of her own imagination.

This may be somewhat more difficult to accomplish, yet the gals that can pull off this practice modality achieve a higher level of artistic expression.

- gloves

Hair pieces, boot polish, tights, skate dress -- a lot goes into a skating costume. When you get fully comfortable, skilled, and graceful, you can don that last flashy accessory: elbow-length gloves.

Opera gloves are a bit of an aesthetically dangerous garment to add to your oeuvre: without doubt they pull attention toward the completion of graceful arm and hand movements. If you don these before your elements are fully competent though, the rest of your program will appear considerably diminished by comparison.

Gloves may only be appropriate at a narrow band of expressiveness. It's like when a guy wears a muscle shirt with arm cutouts: it's unflattering if he has nothing to show. On the other hand if he's already built like Arnold Schwarzenegger then the arm cutouts aren't particularity necessary either.

Wear long gloves when your hands and arms need a bit of assistance expressing what they can already show reasonably well. Only however after you've already figured out how to shine on all of your other elements.