silverflight8: Different shades of blue flowing on a white background like waves (Fractal)
I started taking skating classes again! It has been pretty good so far. The only thing I do not like is the spinning. Oh my god I'm so dizzy and my brain hurts. Apparently it's supposed to get better. It has been...but it's painful. Also I am amazingly hungry afterwards.

I got sorted into Basic 5 and have mostly regained my edges, though I'm still slipping on the backwards outside left - I had my skates sharpened so I think it's a skill/balance issue, not a skate issue. Before I sharpened them, I slipped on ALL my edges, which is pretty scary. I think my weakness on this particular edge is because every rink I go to apparently is diehard counter-clockwise in skating direction. I have tried to convince people to go the other way, but it's ridiculously difficult. So I don't get to actually practice that one. (Edges - skates aren't a flat piece of metal on the bottom like a ]|, they're more like (|, i.e. in a curve, which is measured by the radius of the circle. This makes two edges. Lots of the interesting things in ice skating is done on one of the edges. There's a R/L front and back edge.)

I finally fixed my 3 turns (well, the easy forward outside ones!) This is how you learn to do one foot forwards-to-backwards (or vice versa) turns. I've struggled with this for foreverrrr and it took pretty much 1 comment from the instructor to fix most of my problems. So I feel that alone was worth the price of lessons.
silverflight8: Different shades of blue flowing on a white background like waves (Fractal)
I watched Davis & White's 2010 Olympics free dance, and it was a bit...well, disappointing.

I don't know, it's technically executed beautifully (and dramatically, too; I loved the transitions from the quieter music to the clashing louder one). They're always so very fluid - here's the original dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUzchzkitdQ - but it's just not quite...I can't come up with a better way to say it, because everything is technically so beautifully executed. I love watching them do the movements. But it's not musical, I guess; it's not so much dance as execution, and sometimes - arm movements aside - it looks like they're going through movements. Some of the musical transitions seem to catch them by surprise, or they don't quite pick up on some of the nuances, but perhaps that's just choreography. I guess I like the dance part the best; Davis and White came in second place in the Vancouver Olympics to Virtue and Moir, who had a magical, absolutely magical free dance:


But what I was going to say, before all the movies came up, was that Virtue & Moir have a new free dance, based on Carmen.

Watch the coordination! From 1:42-154 or so, omg. And the last, oh, I don't know, fifteen or twenty seconds is just sdkfl;j, I love their skating.

I mean, look at Baiul jitterbug dancing with Petrenko (singles skater)! I think I grinned throughout the entire dance (and the clothing is priceless too):

She won the 1994 Olympics (as a singles figure skater, not as an ice dancing partner) with a Swan Lake that was more like ballet on ice than anything else [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bH0CAPzef8] but she's so versatile - I'm not the biggest fan of ballet, but I love that she can do so many styles.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
I went ice skating today. In retrospect, I could have chosen a better day. It was negative thirty with windchill. Oops.

I can still skate backwards! I can still brake! I can still skate, period! It's been a few years. I didn't attempt spins. (I hate spins.) There were perhaps two or three dozen people out today - on a nice day, the lagoon is filled with hundreds of people. The relative sparseness of people worked in my favour, though; I was so bundled up there it was exceedingly impractical to look backwards when I skated backwards, so it was all good. I would like to go skating again. Only on a better day, thank you very much.

Reading through Hamlet again. V. exciting.

Ice Dance

Jul. 11th, 2010 08:00 pm
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)


OK, sometimes this is a very anger-filled journal, or one completely swamped with reviews (It's summer. I read voraciously during the summer.)

But today. Aaaah! I went to this...erm, in the interests of accomodating my paranoia, let's call it a fair. And saw the ice exhibit--and it had a circus-style performers and some figure skaters--but also Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (the gold medalists and world champions in ice dance), and aaaah I can't believe I actually got to see them skate! *flail* (Also, becksreid72 had a lovely icon with OTP with them on it, 'cept I can't find it). That just made my whole day. :D


silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
Watching the skaters after they perform, as they wait for their scores, is almost heartbreaking, to use the cliché phrase. That anticipation and dread--they're on national, international TV, and who wants their anguish splashed all over that screen?--is nonetheless painfully obvious. They wave to the camera--presumably us, but the skaters are usually too intent on what's going on now: I know I messed up here, I should have done this. I can't see the scoreboard, so they seem to be looking out into the distance just to my right; occasionally, one of the skaters will try to get the photographer to turn the camera around, making little "time out" signs, and I wince as they keep filming. Sometimes your best is simply not enough.

Edit to fix punctuation.

Skating

Feb. 21st, 2010 08:39 pm
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
The figure-skating and ice dance are Olympic sports, and yeah, the skaters are absolutely amazing to watch. The only thing is, they and their routines have never stuck in my mind quite as clearly as an amateur skater.

I doubt that girl was more than fourteen; dressed in the bulkiness of January-cold-snap-parkas and a silly woolen hat, she was in the middle of one of those awful community outdoor skating rinks. The ones that people spray in the middle of a field with water, and don't use the zamboni--they just push the snow off with shovels, and leave you to deal with the crevasses. It was the winter festival thing, and there were skaters of all ages--little boys with their tiny hockey skates pushing chairs to keep their balance, their fathers skating calmly backwards and keeping an eye on them, people between the ages of six and sixty, going around and around the oval.

I think she was practicing a waltz jump. It was obvious she hadn't much practice; there wasn't the liquid movement that repeated practices makes. But what struck me was that though her jump wasn't perfect, wasn't wrapped-and-tied-up-in-a-pretty-bow, it was real and I could see that she'd get it eventually. Even though there was a clear hesitation in her movements, you could also see the grace in the jump. Perfection can be dulling. But that jump she kept practicing, again and again, began to show that elegance that's so cherished in skating.

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