Lounge of Tomorrow - Winter Olympics 2010

I'd still argue that the level of exposure afforded by being in the Olympics accelerates such changes and tends to guide those changes away from artistry towards technicality and athleticism.

Figure skating is an interesting one to track through history. When it was originally added to the Olympics it was literally "figure" skating, as in figure-8's and such. Once television got into the picture (hah!) it was decided that was too boring so the free skate was added to spice things up, creating that artistic element. As it progressed, it got more and more athletic and technical.

I enjoy figure skating, and definitely consider it more "Olympic", by my personal criteria, than ice dancing or rhythmic gymnastics. But it's right on that line. It certainly involves something approaching the kind of athleticism I look for at an Olympics. But, along the lines of what SL was saying regarding the disconnect between the music and the routines, I dislike the fact that it's evolved into a dispassionate form of dance. It's dance for the sake of technicality, not dance for the sake of art and emotion, which I mostly find bizarre. Sure, some are better at putting their own emotion and personality behind the dance portions than others, but the end result is still a strange bit of meaningless abstract dance that comes across as superfluous to me. And the fact that some skaters, who otherwise should be very proud of their performance on the ice, have to walk away feeling disappointed based on the subjective merits of those dances leaves me feeling cold.

I feel the same about gymnastics, though, as mentioned mostly in regards to floor and balance beam routines where those dance elements are even further dehumanized than they are in ice skating.

Diving, ski aerials, snow board, all rely on "style points" for scoring, but they are somehow different animals to me. The elements those style judgments are made on aren't pretending to be "dance". They are simply showcases of the competitor's ability to maintain body control under increasingly more extreme physical conditions. They aren't deconstructed dance moves, stripped of their artistic meaning in an effort to quantify them.

If the dance elements of figure skating were not judged so technically, if the skaters were free to be actually creative rather between jumps and spins, and people were willing to accept that the results will be subjective (and perhaps a very tiny fraction of the scores), I'd be much more on board. But that just isn't going to happen in the context of a multi-million dollar competitive environment. They need it to be quantified so they can justify the results.