Maurizio Margaglio: "I think we are losing part of ability in ice dance".

Maurizio Margaglio: "I think we are losing part of ability in ice dance".

http://www.wintersport-news.com/12004,News.html

Eleonora D'Eredità & Laura Sciarrillo have published an interview with Maurizio Margaglio in the e-zine Winter Sport News. Magaglio, who with his partner, Barbara Fusar-Poli, won Italy's only ice dance Olympic medal and only World Championship in ice dance, discusses his work with Finnish synchro teams, and with ice dancers in Finland, Italy and the USA.

I found his description of the opportunities of choreographing a synchro group very interesting:

With a group of girls you have to do something different: there isn't any more the intimacy of a couple, showing love to each other etc. On the other hand you have a spectacular amplification of every movement: Every little choreographic detail of an arm movement, multiplied by 16 arms becomes a wonderful transition, or even only bending the legs altogether and then start again, those are things which are amplified by the number of skaters who execute them. Moreover, in my opinion, a beautiful aspect of synchro is being able to use abstract ideas. How could it be possible, with an ice dance pair, to describe a clock, for example? You can do that with a synchro team. Do you want to recreate the idea of a gust of wind? With a pair it's impossible, bit with the girls you can do it. You can make them look like as if the wind is moving them, and you get the impression that a gust of wind has passed among them. All of this gives you a huge freedom for your creativity."

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What a wonderful way to examine synchronized skating! Thanks so much for letting us see this. It makes me look at synchro skating in a new way and see new layers of meaning in it.

Funnily enough, we were talking on the Moves in the Field thread, and the subject of a pas de quatre including two John Nicks pairs, Babilonia/Gardner and Starbuck/Shelley, came up. Mathman enterprisingly found a video of it. The thing I had remembered through the years, a group Ina Bauer, gave me almost exactly the feeling Margoglio described as his first point in this paragraph, the way a single movement is amplified when performed simultaneously by a larger group of skaters. (I believe there were actually competitions for Fours in the old days.)

Starbuck/Shelley skating with Babilonia/Gardner--poor quality because it was recorded in days before cable, but still splendid!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU_NdqwdOuA

On the contrary, among the Compulsories, Finnstep is one of those that is better related with ballroom dancing, to the real ballroom soul. I would like to see this aspect, the interpretation of a dance, particularly rewarded, and not only the edges perfection because in my opinion who wins in this discipline must be able to dance. This is at the base of my mentality, and I am extremely strict about it, otherwise it would have been called “Ice Technique”. [...]
The Technical Specialist should look at the steps and the judges should look at the actual dance: this, in my opinion, has been forgotten.

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And, I didn't know anything about making the Finlandia Trophy a GP! That's probably why a lot of important skaters (Mura, Dornbush, Hanyu, Fernandez, Suzuki, Korpi, Lipnitskaya, Nagasu, V/M, the Shibs, B/S, C/L...) competed there in the last seasons...

One of the authors of the article has said that she believe getting the ballroom character of a dance correct and being able to handle a wide variety of dance styles are considered of key importance in the Italian ice dance program.

In fact, when I look back at the career of Fusar-Poli & Margaglio, I regard getting the character of a dance correct as the key strength of the World champion couple.

This is one reason they won the CD at the 2006 Olympics, and that their Quickstep OD was one of the best ever. In fact, they won the OD at Worlds in 2000 and again in 2001 when they won the World Championships.

Margaglio is often criticized for his technical glitches, but his ability to portray the correct character, particular in the Latin dances, tango, and quickstep, was exceptional, IMO.

In the OD & OSP years, getting the character of the dance right (making a ballroom or street dance look true to life on ice) was of key importance. This distinction has been somewhat lost in the SD era, with its wangoes and polkawaltzes.

I agree with Maurizio that getting it right is important; this is old-fashioned of me.

This is one of the things I dislike about DWTS and consequently why I don't watch a lot of it.. There's a sort of homogenizing of music and dance..I on't know , something is lost , to me.

I understand your frustration. For myself, I like DWTS because it exposes a hitherto lesser-known art form to a mass audience, including people like me. Unlike you, Colleen, I don't have a lot of experience with dance, so some of the subtleties that you worry about won't raise alarm bells in me. But I can see how a purist would not enjoy the show as much as a less experienced viewer like me. It's kind of like some of the popularization of opera. It serves a crucial purpose by bringing in new audiences, but really well-educated opera buffs probably can't tolerate it too well, even when the popularizer is Pavarotti.

Well, the contestants on Dancing with the Stars are amateurs trying to do the best they can.

And that's one of the parts of DWTS that I especially love, Math.