Facta, non verba

Approximately two years ago, I wrote a sincerely gushy blog post about a young and promising dance team: Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov.

However, I have since attributed that blog post to the vagaries of youthful indiscretion, something akin to past follies like wearing sweatpants out in public and getting into drinking contests with a bunch of frat boys twice my size.

Of course, this had slowly but surely become inevitable since Ilinykh/Katsalapov announced that Nikolai Morozov was to be their new coach. Nikolai Morozov’s dance choreography has generally tended to run the gamut from polarizing hot mess (Bourne/Kraatz’s Adagio) to absolute and utter crap (Grushina/Goncharov’s The Feeling Begins), and his work for for Ilinykh and Katsalapov sadly has not been an exception.

Last year’s Ave Maria free dance was basically a pile of overcooked melodrama that seemed oddly old-fashioned on such a young team:

 
….but this year’s Ghost free dance really takes the proverbial cake:

I cannot describe this program (or watch it without cringing, for that matter) in a way that does justice to how I feel about it, but I do credit Ilinykh/Katsalapov’s Ghost for helping me realize why I've never fully supported the introduction of lyrics into competitive elite skating outside of ice dance. Here we see Miss Ilinykh and Mr. Katsalapov literally acting out parts of the lyrics/dialogue that have somehow been placed in this program in an immense lapse of judgment on Mr. Morozov’s part—this, to me,  goes against everything that represents ‘interpretation’ in figure skating: the personal and creative translation of the music to movement on ice. I suppose I don’t mind hearing dialogue and/or lyrics in a figure skating program per se, but literally acting the words seems like a lazy shortcut, using the words as a crutch to tell a story on the ice. Plus, when the dialogue is that cheesy….

ALSO—what is with this team and their apparent fixation on getting shot in their free dances? It was ok when they first did it in Schindler’s List, but by now it’s getting ridiculous….

As a palate cleanser, here are good examples of how lyrics should be used in figure skating programs. The difference here is that these programs skate to the lyrics without acting them out. The human voice, after all, can be viewed as simply one instrument among many in a musical composiion. One can (and should) interpret the melody, rhythm, color, harmony and texture of the human voice as if it were any other instrument: