- veneer

How important is style really, compared to say landing your jumps? Isn't style just a fancied up veneer? Well yes and no; it depends quite a bit upon who you ask. If you invite a random person off the street into the rink to watch you skate a competition, what do you think they see?

A whir of artists, marks on the ice, costumes flitting sparkly, twirling arms, legs, pose, posture, and grace. Primarily the impression they are left with is, yes, your style.

A novice viewer doesn't much know the difference between a double and a triple, a Lutz or an Axel. Surely the other moves look interesting and distinct, but what gets transmitted and absorbed first and foremost is style. Style is the outer shell, the book cover, the inside flaps and backside testimonial that the audience scans first. For novice viewers this is all that they read.

Sure they can see if you long or short or two foot a jump, but they view this through the lens of whether you are smooth or awkward or confident or upset with your performance. So although Style may be the last thing you work on (occasionally in your freestyle) it is the first thing most non-involved audience members register.

I am curious if this perceptual difference is essentially at the heart of the present controversies over scoring. Sometimes framed as whether IJS scoring makes the sport worse by encouraging non-stylish jumpers, the issue may actually be how the ISU selected an audience: they have chosen to focus on pleasing the cognoscenti -- those inside the sport -- rather than the random non-involved viewers off the street. They have stripped off the veneer.

- sparkling

A fairly wide gap spans envisioning and actualization (actualization being the physical expression of a creative concept). You can't do a great job of actualization however without a healthy dose of envisioning. Hence, the first step of artistic skating is getting those old creative imagination juices flowing.

At its core the envisioning process in skating is similar to how it works for any other creative art. You browse other skaters for what you find appealing. You discern, summarize, invert, invent, extrapolate, generalize, and reframe. You add dynamics, texture, and personality. You expand your awareness and sensitivities. You learn to communicate feelings through movement. You find a muse. You learn to move souls.

At the same time though this imaginative pre-vision mental construct doesn't happen in a vacuum. You bracket ideas of what might be possible by feedback of your own expressiveness, a sense for dramatic "reveal," and by practice in building a story arc.

When it all comes together you sparkle.

- principles

In an earlier post I mentioned how a skater learns to express her personality through the style she exhibits in her moves, her music, and her program. Style is neither a personality trait nor a mood though. Certainly you can have all varieties of moods layered atop all sort of personalities, and you may display (or suppress) this personality to various effect. Yet style somehow mediates this interaction.

How do you establish a style, and how do you develop a reputation of being a stylish skater? Well at its foundation, Style is the outward manifestation of big-C Culture. Sure, you know Culture when you see it -- it doesn't have to be Opera or anything particularly highbrow either (Goth is also a Culture). Not too surprisingly Culture is something that is "cultured" in the sense of being raised with patience, attention, and loving care from its birth as a conceptual meme. It's not something that drops from the sky and lands in your skate bag; you grow into a Culture slowly and with devotional intent.

How do you choose a flavor of Culture? Well at its base Culture is the outward manifestation of big P Principles. If you follow certain Principles of behavior (to either a more strict a more flexible adherence) then you will join the Culture along with the other folks who adhere to those same Principles.

Too abstract and philosophical for skating? Not at all. Principles with a fixed level of adherence drives Culture drives your Style on the ice. What this means dear is that when we watch you skate, we can infer your Principles. There are no sheathed souls in front of an audience.

- 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.

- up

Even with the most thorough practicing it can happen: gliding joyfully through the middle of your program, in an unfortunately relaxed moment your brain goes blank. Empty. Silence on the radio. The program music still plays; only if you had a map you could glance around for a reminder of direction.

The phrase I've heard for this is "going up." I'm unsure why it's called that, but in theater it's long been used to signify that you've forgotten your lines.

So now what? Well, it's time to ad lib, or as Sheri says here, fake it until you make it.

Mentally this requires a shift from the playback learning part of your brain over to the playful imaginative lobe of your brain.

I suppose it makes sense that since you know this occasionally can happen, you should also prepare for it. Practicing to ad lib means allowing your imagination to run free, while still keeping time to the music and additionally keeping some semblance of physical control about yourself.

It may seem a bit odd to your coach or the other skaters at the rink that you would spin a whole program just to improvise, but consider the benefit! It's worth a run through at least once each freestyle, if for no other reason than to build confidence and remove the fear of ad libbing when those brainwaves suddenly evaporate.