Ice Dance clinic

On 28 January, one of my skating clubs held an ice dance clinic with Inese Bucevica and two of her students, Ilana Morse and Justin Morrow. Ilana and Justin are a new team, although each skater has had success with past partners. Inese is a four-time Latvian ice dance champion and has her Ballet Masters Degree in Figure Skating from the Moscow School of Performing Arts. She coaches National, World and Olympic skaters and, needless to say, she really knew her stuff.

The clinic was more sparcely attended than the one run by Oleg and Larisa the previous Sunday, and I believe that the lower attendance was for several reasons:

1) Many local skaters do synchro, and the local synchro teams were competing at Easterns that weekend
2) It's ice dance, which tends to be less popular than other forms of figure skating in the US
3) It was Saturday, which is the Jewish sabbath, and the rink is in a heavily orthodox area.

Which simply meant that I got more time with the coaches!

The clinic was divided into two sections. Inese coached, and Ilana and Justin helped her. The first section covered basic ice dance skills, such as chasses, as well as dance-related warm up moves, like inside swingrolls, inside 3-turns, arm movement, timing, etc. The second section focused on learning the preliminary set pattern USFS ice dances - we went through the basics of the Dutch Waltz, the Nasty Canasty (ahem...Canasta Tango) and the very beginning of the Swing Dance. Of course, I jumped right up when Inese asked if anyone wanted to partners with Justin - I love skating with men who can really partner. One of my friends later told me that, while Justin and I were dancing, Inese kept saying, "Good, good." Grins!

For each dance, Inese made Ilana and Justin do a demo of the dance first - of course, they'd spend the day before relearning these basic dances, which neither of them have done in years. At the end, they demo'd their CD for next year's nationals, which was the...I forget. What's the CD for Novice Nationals next year? Ravensburger Waltz? It was some sort of Waltz. Sorry.