Mention the word “figures” in a skating forum and you get a predictable set of two-sentences replies. In my opinion you can love figures for the visual art, or for the way they help train your body, or for both.
My story: I entered for the training. I had just been skating 2 months and had not yet settled on a training plan, when I was visiting in Alaska for two weeks. I saw (coach) Debby Cook had a scribe with her so I asked her to teach me for two weeks, and she used that time to give me an introduction. From day one it was obvious, I asked “how do people train without this stuff?” (They don’t). Based on my limited skating knowlege, it was clear that MITF was inferior. And I learned a long time ago to be “ruthless” in my training, i.e. make use of the best resources available to me.
Debby told me about World Figure Sport, which I joined over the summer of 2024. When I went to Lake Placid that October, I became entranced by the designs on the ice. I’d never seen anything like it, I had never thought of myself as a visual artist. The idea of thinking about the design I’m drawing together with how I use my body to make the design — that was all new to me, the ultimate fusion of visual and performance art. Nina-Stark’s workbook helped me conceptualize that connection.
Ballet has well established pedagogies, which two people wrote down: Cecchetti and Vaganova. There are of course differences between “schools” of ballet, and those differences are fascinating. But there is also a degree of standardization and agreement, not just on what positions and movements constitute ballet, but also how to teach them in progression. Great teachers need nothing more than themselves, but average and mediocre teachers are improved if they can plug into a pedagogy; I saw this with Suzuk violin education, in which every song students learn has a set of purposes of what needs to be learned from that song, and every Suzuki teacher knows what it is.
With ISU figures (the set of figures chosen by the ISU in 1897s as training for their new sport), the sport had a curriculum. I believe there was pedagogical genius behind it, but it was never developed fully as a pedagogy, as was being done at the same time for ballet. We have “Evaluation of Errors in Figures” but no companion book “How to teach Students to Move Beyond Errors in Figures.” Every coach had to figure it out for themself. Over-reliance on private instruction-only, along with lack of pedagogy, led to a situation in which the FS training available to most students is both mediocre and overpriced. And that led to the “abolishment” of figures: people can’t value what they don’t understand. I have studied all the arguments on why figures were “abolished,” and every one of them would be laughed out of the ballet studio, because there is a greater core understanding in the community on how training the human body works. That fact that serious FS people took these arguments seriously is embarassing:
- Nobody performs at the barre on stage, so we shouldn’t spend half our time training that way.
- Ballet training costs too much, if we skip barre and just train center for 45 minutes, that will make the art more accessible. (That is in effect what a legion of mediocre “Dolly Dinkle” Ballet / Tap / Jazz schools do. My experience with FS clubs is I’m surrounded by a Dolly Dinkle school.)
- If we eliminate barre, we can spend more time on impressive jumps and turns. (Top ballet dancers do amazing jumps and turns on stage. But the pedagogy also recognizes they come with risks, and that segment of a 90-minute ballet class is limisted to ~20 minutes. Injury and short careers are a problem in ballet; but there is even less attention to career longevity in FS and its “be number one at all costs” attitude. In ballet we are just trying to be in the top handful so we can make it into a company, where over time we might be promoted to principle dancer).
Back to your question: I don’t think it matters whether people understand your intentions, figures in the context of the sport are still dead and not coming back — whether in competition or as a training curriculum. USFSA made a reasonable choice at first — keep the figures for training and lower-level competitions — and that only lasted two years. The community did not understand them and did not value them, and that has not changed. Instead, the rules of the sport were changed to devalue them even further. Everything you say above is true. But under IJS it has all been compressed into a couple of “step sequences” that count for a small fraction of the total score.
Yes I saw the collage of skidded turns, it was quite a feat! I also take a lot of pictures of the ice, usually my own figures trying to skate silently. In my first year I attended the (non-qualifying) “Bay State Games” in my hometown. I did not enter because the USFSA program today is so incompatible with figure training, I would have had to interrupt / delay my training to prepare some jumps and spins my body was not yet ready for. But I watched, and while I was there I noticed some of the teenager kids landing double loop jumps on inside edges (I think these were kids from Skating Club of Boston). That was curious, so I took a picture of it. I was later discussing that with the head of my local (Dolly Dinkle) club. She thought it was creepy that I took a picture of the ice, and she did not think it was OK for me to criticize skaters who (in her words) were “better than me.” Sigh… this is the same person who banned figures on her club’s ice time. Her skaters have zero control, and hence are unable to avoid someone skating a figure, one kid almost nailed me pushing back from the boards without looking. When her top skater injured herself on a jump, the head coach blamed me, apparently for skating in the “Lutz corner.” The tracings at that club all look like snakes writhing in the wind.
In the sport today I do not see people curious and eager to learn and train their body with precision and control. Those skaters used to exist (see Fassi’s book, 1980), but those kinds of kids today will not see FS as being “for them” and will go learn ballet instead. I do not see inherent joy in breaking things down and building a technique from the ground up, building the small details step by step. I do see people who just want to throw their bodies around, and who admit they have no idea what they’re doing, but if they fall on the same jump enough times, eventually that jump is something they will “have” (meaning, land without falling). I do see people post the most awful skating performances with zero awareness of how they look, and then see I their friends all comment on how amazing it all is. I do see judges passing MITF tests shat should have failed because they weren’t even on the right edge. And I do see a lot of people whose motivation seems to be 100% external: they are happy with their performance as long as they get a medal; meanwhile, competitions have proliferated to the extent that anyone can get a medal eventually. I’m sorry, the sport is a complete embarassement. Very few skaters seem to have learned or even care about the most fundamental / important thing that comes with dance training: Awareness through Movement (see Feldenkreis).
Before people will care about figures, they have to care about training their body beyond “having” (landing) a jump. That attitude is core to arts, and not to sports. I remember learning from my violin teacher, how to distinguish the most subtle differences in tone quality; and I write about that on my blog in terms of form and movement quality. In the 20th century FS maintained a balance between art and sport, but FS today is all sport no art. The people who would be interested in what you have to share are not in FS today, and students’ response when you share it with them is predictable. You are spot-on, you have to learn things slowly before doing them quickly. But as I discovered in my own training… you cannot participate in today’s ISU sport while training that way, at least not for the first 3 years (I could now if I they had not banned people like me). You are working in a location with families paying a lot of money to win competitions. They want RESULTS! You are spot-on in explaining why Janet Lynn’s skating was so good (inspiring for me). But IJS today will not reward it and skaters today are externally motivated. So how will it go over with these families, telling them that if they train your way they will eventually do better step sequences but they won’t jump for the first couple of years and they won’t be entering any USFSA competitions? They will see motorized spinners and jump coaches as a more predictable path to winning with triples.
That is why I am advocating to separate from the sport and call it an art. Because we need fundamentally different people involved, with fundamentally different motivations. Skating sport and skating art have diverged: same nominal technique but different things valued and increasingly different training. I like World Figure Sport because it explicitly supports skating art: both visual art (figures) and performing art (fancy skating). In the 2020’s, you will probably have an easier time recruiting ballet dancers than skaters.