Tricia Offerdahl continues her development of Leah’s program. This is Part 4 in a multi-part series. In this video, you’ll see Trish give Leah difficult footwork, but decide not to perfect it. Instead of “wasting time” on footwork the skater can easily learn later, Trish continues the process of laying out the program. Trish uses the phrase “muddle through.” In order to make progress, Trish recognizes the need to “muddle through” to make progress toward the overall result in the shortest amount of time.
Notice that Trish asks when Leah’s next competition is. She is simply using that information to decide if she’s making the program too hard. You can see by her response that she thinks Leah can do the program she has envisioned (hard). As Trish says, she wants the program “to pull her up to the new level.” Most good choreographers agree that a new program should challenge a skater.
In this video, you can see how this skater has a difficult time with direction. It is fairly common among skaters to learn a movement or pattern in one place and then become resistant to changing it, even though the change is very easy. You can see how Trish must remain patient to get the skater to adjust the pattern as she wants.
This time, Trish uses a spiral to match a musical crescendo. The spiral is powerful because it involves the body becoming completely still after being in motion or having movement. Obviously the spiral moves, but the body is still. So far, Trish has used a lunge, a ballet jump, and a spiral to hit musical cues. These represent DOWN, UP, and STILLNESS. When choreographing, these are valuable tools and concepts you can easily apply with other elements, movements, or positions.
(I’ve left most of the program run throughs, with and without music, in this video so you can see the program evolve. -Trevor)
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3 responses to “Figure Skating Choreography Ideas – Part 4 (Tricia Offerdahl)”
Great information about the player. It is so hard to maximize time putting a program together while using the rink sound system. I can see this would allow hitting the music cues better and accomplishing more in the lesson time.
The music player is basically just an mp3 player and speaker that Trish carries around on the ice so Leah can hear it. It’s just like a small boombox. It sounds great to us watching this video because I have a microphone attached to Trish so we can hear what she’s saying. Trish’s microphone is picking up the relatively quiet sound coming from her mp3 player, but it sounds great on the video thanks to the proximity of the microphone and the mp3 speaker
Awesome! I love watching this series. It helps me so much! Thanks Tricia! I also have a question about the music player. Is it a wireless connection to the rink system, or is the sound coming out of the player? We need something like this at our rink! Thanks again!!