When Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir leave the ice at 7:56 PM Friday, it will be the end of an era as Ice Dance cuts another root to its origin as ballroom dancing on ice. The 2010 Olympic Dance event will be the last that includes a Compulsory Dance segment and Virtue & Moir will be the last to appear inan Olympic Compulsory Dance. The seeds of this were planted long ago, dating back to as early as 1988 with the first talk of eliminating compulsory figures from singles skating and compulsory dances from Ice Dancing. While figures were eliminated a few years later, the compulsory dances have held on for more than 20 years as part of the competition structure.
Competitive Ice Dancing began nearly 100 years ago as competitive events in individual dances. The discipline evolved into an event consisting of multiple compulsory dances, and later a Free Dance was added to the event.
The number of compulsory dances included in the event declined over several decades and a third dance segment was added in the form of new set pattern dances choreographed to a prescribed rhythm. Many of the newer compulsory dances were created for this portion of the Ice Dance competition, such as the Golden Waltz created by Kilomva & Ponomarenko, which was skated this year at Four Continents and the European Championships, and will be skated at the World Championships in March 2010.
In the late 1990s, judging scandals in the dance event led to the set pattern dance being replaced by what is now the Original Dance, which is currently a mini-free-dance with four elements skated to a prescribed rhythm. In recent years, the two compulsory dances that had been part of competition were reduced to one, as a time and cost savings measure for competitions. The Olympic and World Championships this season will be determined from three event segments; a Compulsory Dance, the Original Dance, and a Free Dance. This is the last season that will be the format for this event.
The Dance event will be reconfigured this summer at the 2010 ISU Congress, ostensibly as a requirement from the IOC. We say ostensibly because the ISU Council has a long track record of attributing to the IOC changes it would prefer to make, but is unwilling to get out in front of itself. The official justification is that the IOC wants the Ice Dance event to have the same two segment format as the Singles and Pairs events. This is reflected in the naming of the new dance in the proposed rules changes on the ISU agenda for June.
Beginning next season (it is a foregone conclusion this change will take place) the dance event will consist of a Short Dance and Free Dance, analogous to the Short Program an Free Skate in the Singles and Pairs events. This short dance will consist of elements similar to the current Original Dance with the addition of a step sequences which will be a piece of a compulsory dance of a prescribed rhythm. All that will remain of compulsory dance in the event will be this snippet of a step sequences within the Short Dance.
This change will be introduced certainly for the Senior division, and perhaps for the Junior Division as well. Dueling proposals call for the Junior event to be identical to the Senior event, to change some time after the Senior event, or not to change at all. Some in the ISU, such as ISU Council member Courtney Jones, would like to see compulsory dance preserved in the Junior division.
Efforts to reformulate the dance event have been ongoing at the ISU for the past two years, and early in 2009 test demonstrations were offered the ice dance community in Europe and North America. How this will be good for Ice Dancing or the competition structure has never been made clear. The discussion/justification has thus far been based on time and money issues, and not the identity of Ice Dance, though that will surely change under the new format.
At the Olympic level, this change seem to offer no practical value. The arena will continue to be used the same number of days, costs savings will be minimal if any, and at this Olympics $2.5 million in ticket sales would have been lost by eliminating the compulsory dance. If the goal is uniformity in the number of event segments simply for uniformity, then a foolish consistency IS the hobgoblin of small minds.
For some ISU competitions the time and costs benefits to the organizers, if not the discipline, is more obvious. But at what cost to Ice Dancing? The trend since 1998 has to make Ice Dancing more like Pairs-Lite. IJS has reinforced that. Elimination the compulsory dances takes it one step further.
Copyright 2010 by George S. Rossano