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Kelly Rippon (Adam's mother) has a wonderful interview show on Instagram Live. She's recently interviewed a lot of guests on a variety of topics related to figure skating, and recently, to the Olympics. It's worth checking out.
I was fascinated and engaged by an interview Kelly had with a former Yale alumni, Priscilla Gilman, who taught at Yale and at Vassar. Gilman ended up leaving academia because she had two sons with special needs who both have apparently grown up to attend college (one at Yale, the other at Vassar -- one is math-oriented, the other artistically-oriented). Gilman also writes and she teaches an adult class at Yale, and she hosts book clubs, and leads meditation workshops, and she's an uber figure skating aficionado. Gilman and Kelly Rippon met and bonded over motherhood and figure skating. They have shared a wonderful conversation, which took me down memory lane re figure skating, in so many aspects. Gilman is a huge figure skating fan because her father loved many sports, including figure skating. Apparently, Gilman's entire family loved watching figure skating. This interview is a fun listen.
Since Gilman's specialty as a Ph.D. professor of English Literature is Romantic Poetry, she knows that Wordsworth was a figure skater, and that he wrote poetry about figure skating, a bit of which Gilman references at the end of the interview: "Wordsworth wrote that skating is a rapture. He described it as 'giving his body to the wind.' When you watch a skater ... they are giving their body to this -- they are surrendering and they are inhabiting the moment. And it's transporting. It is a transcendent experience to watch [a skater] doing that..."
For the upcoming Worlds, Kelly Rippon and Priscilla Gilman are planning to meet again and to match specific skaters and their programs to poems. That should be fun, if you like poetry and figure skating, which I do!
Other recent guests who have spoken to Kelly Rippon include: Polina Edmunds; Meagan Duhamel; Kaitlyn Weaver; P.J. Kwong; Jeremy Abbott; Tai Babilonia; Todd Eldredge, et al. Rippon has also interviewed a special guest about sports and emotions; an Olympic photographer, and ice dancer, Colin Grafton.
ETA:
Interview with Jeremy Abbott on artistry in figure skating. Jeremy's discussion of Nathan Chen's skating, is exactly what I've talked about here in a few threads about what makes Nathan unique as an artist and athlete, and how doing all the technical elements (especially all the quads) necessarily takes up a huge amount of energy, which requires a skater to not be too overly abandoned. There has to be a fine line, plus this is why some people may feel that Nathan's skating is not emotionally accessible. Part of that is his personality, and part of it is how focused he has to be, which sacrifices some expressiveness. However, Nathan has worked on balancing artistry with the quads. Because he's so sensitive to the music and he has a style of skating that has flair and dramatic movement qualities, what he does really works. He's entertaining, he's athletic, and he's cool, calm and collected. Happily, once he got all the hard stuff out of the way this time around at the Olympics, he lit up the ice with joy and with an abandon we don't always see from Nathan on the ice.
I was fascinated and engaged by an interview Kelly had with a former Yale alumni, Priscilla Gilman, who taught at Yale and at Vassar. Gilman ended up leaving academia because she had two sons with special needs who both have apparently grown up to attend college (one at Yale, the other at Vassar -- one is math-oriented, the other artistically-oriented). Gilman also writes and she teaches an adult class at Yale, and she hosts book clubs, and leads meditation workshops, and she's an uber figure skating aficionado. Gilman and Kelly Rippon met and bonded over motherhood and figure skating. They have shared a wonderful conversation, which took me down memory lane re figure skating, in so many aspects. Gilman is a huge figure skating fan because her father loved many sports, including figure skating. Apparently, Gilman's entire family loved watching figure skating. This interview is a fun listen.
Since Gilman's specialty as a Ph.D. professor of English Literature is Romantic Poetry, she knows that Wordsworth was a figure skater, and that he wrote poetry about figure skating, a bit of which Gilman references at the end of the interview: "Wordsworth wrote that skating is a rapture. He described it as 'giving his body to the wind.' When you watch a skater ... they are giving their body to this -- they are surrendering and they are inhabiting the moment. And it's transporting. It is a transcendent experience to watch [a skater] doing that..."
For the upcoming Worlds, Kelly Rippon and Priscilla Gilman are planning to meet again and to match specific skaters and their programs to poems. That should be fun, if you like poetry and figure skating, which I do!
Other recent guests who have spoken to Kelly Rippon include: Polina Edmunds; Meagan Duhamel; Kaitlyn Weaver; P.J. Kwong; Jeremy Abbott; Tai Babilonia; Todd Eldredge, et al. Rippon has also interviewed a special guest about sports and emotions; an Olympic photographer, and ice dancer, Colin Grafton.
ETA:
Interview with Jeremy Abbott on artistry in figure skating. Jeremy's discussion of Nathan Chen's skating, is exactly what I've talked about here in a few threads about what makes Nathan unique as an artist and athlete, and how doing all the technical elements (especially all the quads) necessarily takes up a huge amount of energy, which requires a skater to not be too overly abandoned. There has to be a fine line, plus this is why some people may feel that Nathan's skating is not emotionally accessible. Part of that is his personality, and part of it is how focused he has to be, which sacrifices some expressiveness. However, Nathan has worked on balancing artistry with the quads. Because he's so sensitive to the music and he has a style of skating that has flair and dramatic movement qualities, what he does really works. He's entertaining, he's athletic, and he's cool, calm and collected. Happily, once he got all the hard stuff out of the way this time around at the Olympics, he lit up the ice with joy and with an abandon we don't always see from Nathan on the ice.
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