I love Daria's movement quality and musical timing, and her SP is quite illustrative of that (today she was a little off-timing at the end because she stumbled on one of her steps, but when she's clean her performance is just wonderful). I originally started writing a very long post about Kamila, Daria and Maya's musicality, and how they match up to the 3A (as a part 2 to my other post about the 3A's musicality), but I never posted it. I originally wrote this about Daria because she seriously impressed me. (Beware...very, very long post ahead.)
Aside from inconsistency, Daria's biggest artistic issue is her face. It is blank. She is a gorgeous skater, but she does not skate with her face at all. It often looks odd because her body shows so much passion and her face is just...mismatched. Blank. To dramatic, swelling, cinematic music.
But in terms of range of movement to the music, Daria really, really impresses me. She is twelve. Please Don't Make Me Love You is NOT an easy piece to skate to for a twelve-year-old, because if you pay attention to the song, the mood changes so often. It's not like (for example) Kamila's SP where the mood goes from soft/slow/graceful in the first half to intense/forceful/powerful in the second. Instead, it is constantly moving from one to another and back. The singer's voice goes from loud to soft to loud again, the crescendo comes in and then goes just as quickly and then suddenly it's back again. It requires a twelve-year-old to understand musical phrasing on a relatively intricate level, and Daria does it beautifully. I honestly think that nearly any other girl her age would look like they are skating through that music, but Daria makes it special. And this is coming from someone who does not follow her closely, would not consider herself a Daria fan, etc - I honestly think she has a musical gift. If only she could get more consistency!
If you watch one of those rare occasions where Daria skates her SP clean, you will see that she knows how to be soft and graceful to the soft and graceful parts of the music, and how to be sharp and harsh and quick with the loud, crescendo parts of the music. Which is very impressive considering her music keeps going from one to the other and back again, over and over. It means that this kid genuinely understands music. It's not a front half/back half type affair, which is not easy either but is certainly easier than the constantly changing vibe of Please Don't Make Me Love You.
And as for Kamila, I love, love, love her extensions. I think she is very fluid in her movement, I love the control and flexibility she has in her body at such a young age. I think she is a prodigy and I would absolutely die for her lines. But I think that in terms of actually understanding her music and how it correlates to body movement, she isn't quite on Daria's level (yet), and this is the most apparent at the beginning of her SP, when the music is extremely slow and soft and minimal, yet she is hitting every single movement very sharply, similarly to how she moves in the second half of her program when her music becomes intense. It's not only a matter of how many movements she has to hit in the choreography, it's also about how sharp and powerful she hits each movement - it doesn't correlate to the beginning music at all. Compare her to (clean) Daria, where she will vary her movements between soft, graceful music and intense, powerful music. But when Kamila is older I am sure she will understand the music better, because she is still so young and she has plenty of time. Both Daria and Kamila are beautiful skaters and have so much potential.
