#compulsory dances

Compulsory, or pattern, dances are the origins of competitive ice dance. There are dances that were first choreographed more than a century ago still in the playbook! The ISU does not take adding to the pattern dances lightly; the last one included was the Finnstep, first performed in the 2008/2009 season. They announced plans several years ago to create some new ones, but those plans seem to have been put on pause.  @peacfulboo reminded me that in 2019, the ISU finished the Tea Time Foxtrot, a new compulsory for the junior level, and was used for the 2019/2020 season.  (Now we just need to have the Maple Leaf March finished for the seniors.)

Compulsory dances are literally a set dance.  Every step, edge, and turn is planned - not just what to do, or when, but even where it happens on the ice.  Most holds are planned.  Sometimes even the free leg placement is planned. The music is a very particular beat, and they even used to have specific compulsory dance music that was played on repeat for the teams to skate to.  By forcing every team to do the exact same dance, with very little variation, it also (theoretically) forces the judges to compare the same thing between teams - just like, when a skater performs a jump, it is easy to compare the jump to someone else because it is just the same.  Did they do the same number of rotations, how was the height, the distance, the smoothness of the landing?  In pattern dances, it is just different things that they are looking for - how quickly were they skating, were their turns and edges clean, is their hold close together, are they in unison?

And back in the day, they would skate the entire pattern as many times as the big old book would indicate - at least twice, and if the pattern was short, then it was possible that they would have to skate it three or four (or more!) times, with no pause in between.  This was a way to help differentiate the quality of the teams’ skating.  The first time they skated a pattern, they could build up some speed with crossovers; but going into a pattern for a second time means that you have to be relying on your good skating skills to keep up the speed and power - and if the pattern was getting significantly smaller with every round, it was then obvious that the team didn’t have great skating skills.

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Compulsory dances (these days) are separated by how difficult they are; young teams still learn and compete compulsory dances, as they teach the skaters the basics of any ice dance program - holds, edges, turns, lines, unison.  The youngest teams will skate patterns that won’t even be listed in the big old book.  This season, juniors skate the pattern called Blues, and the Seniors are skating the Midnight Blues, as the Midnight Blues is considered to be a more difficult compulsory (and the patterns are indeed very different from each other).  

For many years, teams all the way up including seniors, competed:

~at least one compulsory dance (set pattern steps, set music, everyone exactly the same)

~an original dance (the name of this section and rules varied over the years but the main idea was you could create your own choreography but there was a strict theme)

~and a free dance (and for a long time, that literally meant that there was no real rules or expectations, aside from the usual ice dance rules like not separating too much or lifting over the head).

Compulsory dances were, up through 2010, a staple of the ice dance world, though through the years, they grew less and less prominent at the senior level. Teams used to compete more than one compulsory in a single competition; then it was reduced to one; and then in the 2010/2011 season, the compulsory dance at the junior and senior level was set aside, and the short dance was born.

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Basically, the ISU took the compulsory dance, and put it inside of the original dance, and made it into an element that would be scored like a twizzle or a lift.  

Back in the mid-2000′s when figure skating changed from 6.0 scoring to the current CoP (Code of Points) system, compulsories were scored on GOE (grade of execution) only - there were no technical controllers/specialists, and no levels.  There were only the judges, who would weigh in with their -3 to +3 based on how they felt the skaters performed.  The patterns were supposed to be done correctly, according to the big old book, but there was no way to really enforce that and it was still a very subjective section of ice dance.

So when they turned the compulsory into an element in the short dance, they also had to come up with a way to give it levels, like all the other elements - and so they created the idea of key points.  

They looked at how every dance was planned out - every edge, every turn, most holds, many ways to hold the free leg - and they said, ‘okay, let’s say that these particular moments will be the important ones’.  Now, instead of it just being the idea that the skater needed to be on a back outside edge, it was mandatory that the skater was, or else lose a level.  The exact way that those key points/levels have been marked have changed a little bit over the last two quads, but the general idea has remained the same. 

The first season that the SD was skated (2010/2011), they put the entire Golden Waltz pattern into the SD.  The Golden Waltz, one of the hardest compulsories to skate, takes about a minute to skate.  The SD was only intended to be a 2.5 minute program, and one minute of it was used to skate the Golden Waltz.  That left one and a half minutes to do a midline step sequence, twizzles, a lift, and to inject as much personality as possible.

(in this video, the midline step sequence starts at about 0:38; the Golden Waltz begins at about 1:05 and ends at about 2:20; they immediately go into their twizzles; and of course, then their lift shortly afterwards.)

This was also the first time that the ISU was melding a compulsory dance with another rhythm that might or might not particularly fit together.  Teams were allowed to either do this Golden Waltz with more waltz, or they could do the Golden Waltz with a foxtrot or a quickstep or with a tango.  The latter was more difficult to marry, in terms of both musical feeling and tempo and most teams chose to do an all-waltz, or at least a quickstep/foxtrot program.  VM were one of the few to choose a tango, and out of those who did, also one of the few to make the two very similar in theme so that the program felt cohesive. 

The second season (2011/2012), the chosen pattern was the Rhumba, one of the shortest patterns, at a whopping 15 seconds and half way around the rink.  They required the skaters to skate it twice, either in a row, or separated, which still only took up 30 seconds of the program.  Teams were required to choose one or more other “Latin” rhythms to compliment it - for example, samba, merengue, cha cha, mambo, or more rhumba - but not allowed a tango.

In 2012/2013 (Yankee Polka, with more polka, a march, or a waltz) and 2013/2014 (Finnstep with foxtrot, Charleston, or swing), skaters still had to do one full pattern of the chosen compulsory; but after the Sochi Olympics and the new rules came out, the compulsory dance was reduced, again.  How?  By now not requiring the skaters to do the entire pattern.  

Now, the ISU not only chooses which pattern will be skated, they choose a particular step on which the skaters must start, and the step on which they must finish, as a set pattern.  Then, the skaters are allowed to follow the general layout of what the rest of the pattern would have looked like, but do their own choreography to get there.  So, everyone does the same section of the pattern, and then even though the rest is technically different, it can still feel the same as they are all skating in the same general directions.  

(The exception was the Rhumba of 2017/2018, only because the pattern is so short they did the entire thing rather than only part of it, because the full pattern was still only half the rink, before getting to do their own choreo to complete the full circle of the rink.)

What next season will bring is still unknown as the ISU has surprisingly not made public what any of the new rules could be, or a pattern, or a theme.

But you can find all the patterns, the descriptions, and the history of what was skated for juniors/seniors in which season, at the wonderful resource of ice-dance.com.

I’ve used a lot of Midnight Blues references this year, so I’m going to do that again as an example here.

The above is a picture of the midnight blues pattern, one for what the woman is doing, and one for what the man is doing at the same time.  If you look closely, each part is listed as steps, because the dance tells the skaters what to do at each step, and this picture shows where they should be on the ice when they’re doing it.

The part of the pattern that the ISU required in 2016/2017, and this season, was steps 5 to 14. Now, it’s a little backwards, because the start point here (the flag) is by the judges, and yet the dance rules for 2016/2017 and for this season, they said the skaters should begin on the opposite side of the judges, so the dance was “flipped”.  In general, those steps 5-14 make up about half the rink; then the skaters continue to skate in hold, with their own choreography, for the other half of the rink in the same basic shape.

(in this video, the mid-line step sequence starts at about 1:00, the Midnight Blues pattern starts about 1:48 and ends about 2:10, at which time the partial step sequence starts immediately and then ends at about 2:45; the twizzles follow and then the lift.  Coincidentally, it follows the same set of elements as the other video I broke down, but there is no rule to specify in which order the elements must be performed.)

And this is the description of what is happening in just the steps 5-12, LOL, not even half the pattern.  There is also a chart, which just literally lists off exactly what is happening without quite as much commentary.  But can see, clearly, that it is very, very detailed and every team is supposed to do all these things.  (There are other discussions about variations that are being performed by teams this year in free leg and hold choices, and a little speculation about why it is being obviously allowed, but I’m not going to get into that here.)

And this is the chart for the chosen key points for the Midnight Blues.  There are four key points, each with multiple requirements to be able to achieve that one point, and very strict.  Get all four points, get a level four.  Miss a point (by missing even one clear edge or clean turn), get a level 3.  Pretty straightforward, but not at all easy to achieve.

Did you make it through all this?  Congratulations!  Watch some baby VM doing a compulsory to clear your head.