by Jacquelyn Thayer
During a 1920s jazz club-themed group number at the Laval, Quebec, stop of Rock the Rink, the skating show set to wrap its tour of Canada this Saturday, my attention was caught by something out of the spotlight. While world champion Carolina Kostner ably vamps through “Why Don’t You Do Right,” the remaining cast sit back as engaged spectators. There are open-mouthed stares and chair swivels and then there is Tessa Virtue, casually snapping her fingers like tablemate Kaetlyn Osmond, but doing something beyond keeping time. This is a rhythmically capable cast; snapping to a beat is, to be facile, a snap. And this is too much an understatement of what Virtue demonstrates.
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Virtue isn’t merely on the beat; she embodies it, moving through it and it through her. Such sensitivity to and expression of rhythm is a hallmark of her skating overall, the factor that’s allowed such tremendous diversity in her body of work with lifetime partner Scott Moir — himself, of course, an exceptionally gifted mover.
This is the vision of ice dance upon which Rock the Rink — even with a cast mostly comprising singles and pair skaters — was built. (Indeed, when you enlist Jeremy Abbott and Carolina Kostner, alongside Canadian tour mainstay Patrick Chan, to your cast, you’re prioritizing musicality and bladework.) After a standard lineup of solo routines, Rock the Rink shifts into a succession of group outings like that described above, and it’s here that we journey through a riotous range of genres, each demanding that the cast get comfortable with some level of partnering. This show asks its strongest skaters to work, and none moreso than Virtue and Moir.
Certainly, beyond their intricate new solo to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” created by rising choreographer and National Ballet of Canada principal Guillaume Côté, the effort is clearest in the incorporation of past bits of competitive choreo throughout the show. In the Rolling Stones-scored group introduction, they recreate the opening steps and midline step sequence of their 2018 2x-Olympic gold-winning “Sympathy for the Devil” Latin short dance; they close the show with a deeply nostalgic tour through major free dances past in “Fix You.” Within that 1920s club number, “Sway” paraphrases their vintage-themed short dances from 2010-11 and 2013-14; in the routine overall, one could also squint and find an allusion or two to their Charleston original dance from 2008-09.
And some choices are simply evocative for longtime fans. A lively Motown group routine not only highlights Virtue’s rhythmic virtuosity and Moir’s insanely contagious joy in performing, but also can’t help but remind the viewer of one of the team’s rare purely fun exhibition programs, 2012’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and Virtue’s frequent citing of Marvin Gaye as a favorite. For this longtimer, the nostalgia sometimes surged beyond Virtue and Moir’s career — “Fix You” also recalling Maia and Alex Shibutani’s tremendously successful free dance to same in 2015-16, “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue’s underrated Great Gatsby free dance of the year before.
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Ultimately, such callbacks are embedded in a far greater act of reflection: Rock the Rink feels like a picture of ice dance gone by. To the point, an ice dance of five to ten years’ past — the Vancouver and Sochi eras when Virtue and Moir first reigned, in a system where trends and program requirements favored clear dance styles and range, or at least an impression of such; when, in skating beyond, Kostner, Chan, and pair Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov were taking world titles, Abbott setting a bar for US men in the waning days before quad domination. And to this environment was invited lead choreographer Charlie White, assisted by dancer and choreographer Randi Strong.
White and partner Meryl Davis were, of course, the other leading ice dance duo of the era, alternating world titles with Virtue and Moir and picking up 2014’s Olympic gold. He was also in the trenches with the Canadians, training with them in Canton, Michigan, for nearly a decade before each team’s 2014 departure — then temporary, for Virtue and Moir, presumably permanent for Davis and White — from competition. The battles among fans and the commentariat regarding each team’s strengths, scores, and results were understandably fierce, but now they are beside the point.
If Virtue and Moir’s goal was to present a concept of a time that was — the first prime of their career, when their greatest strengths influenced those both behind and competing against them; when they most challenged the sport, daring the introduction of new rules and inviting last-minute murmured suggestions to alter this move or that — was there ever anyone better-suited to the job than White, who had a closer view of it all than most?
This sense of purity, as it were, extends to the cast and production more generally. Volosozhar and Trankov weight elements like death spirals and aesthetic lifts as much as competition-illegal tricks; Chan manages to devote a crowd-friendly song like “Shout” to footwork. The standout of Abbott’s solo to Santana’s “Treat” is its musical nuance through tempo changes, not a handful of jumps. Kostner conveys emotion in “Ne Me Quitte Pas” through mature edgework as much as expression. It’s little wonder that the show’s major lyrical routine, “Let You Go,” featuring live accompaniment by band Birds of Bellwoods, features just five cast members — Abbott, Chan, and Kostner alongside Virtue and Moir.
And what of Virtue and Moir’s own solo? The musical selection is, first of all, significant. Among longtime fans, one of the couple’s most celebrated free dances has been a modern piece conceived in part by off-ice choreographer Jennifer Swan, a program only skated a few times in 2009 due to early season injury: a pairing of Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky” and “Money.” Even during the next season’s Vancouver Olympics, the team fielded a fan question as to whether they’d ever return to Floyd. “My favorite Pink Floyd song is ‘Wish You Were Here,'” replied Moir. “And you won’t see it this exhibition, but we love the music and eventually, we’re going to come back to it.”
Lyrical programs in ice dance — particularly exhibition numbers, which lack competition’s old audible beat or tempo change requirements — tend to highlight melody and phrasing while downplaying the underlying rhythm. An example is Virtue and Moir’s 2016 “What’s Love Got to Do With It” from choreographers Marie-France Dubreuil and David Wilson, which emphasizes continuous flow while the beat recedes as a background component.
But Côté’s work on “Wish You Were Here” really has more in common with Virtue and Moir’s modern material, like Swan’s efforts on that first Floyd program or her later Carmen free dance. The beat, however at times subtle in the music itself, takes precedence. It is, perhaps, the fresh perspective that comes of having a floor-oriented creator take on the ice.
It’s difficult for illustrative purposes to isolate out the rhythm from the melodic line; as in a song itself, they’re by necessity closely bound, and to pinpoint one can mean having to set aside notice of the other. But in the side-by-side sequence beginning at “…from a cold steel rail,” through “…your heroes for ghosts,” watch for something clever: the feet keep the rhythm, the upper body the accents:
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To work with Côté is to draw in one more aspect of the Virtue/Moir legend — Virtue’s famous childhood decision to turn down an opportunity with the National Ballet School in favor of skating and her partnership with Moir. As Côté would note, this early experience didn’t grant the team a special expertise in ballet. Simultaneously, that prioritized partnership, and that ultimate lack of specialization, were the things to shape them as the dancers they’d become.
Virtue and Moir have stated that Rock the Rink marks their formal retirement from skating; whether that will hold true remains a question for the future. And their potential closing act is this: not a simple retread of glory years, nor a bone thrown towards today’s trends, but an ideal — of skating in its purest forms, of entertainment delivering more than a simple appeal to broad emotion or splashy tricks — stealthily conveyed through a two-plus-hour show that works far harder than its peers.