Czech ice dancers skated to the first climate change program

The post-Olympics figure skating season unfolded in September 2022 with Challenger Series around the world, where Czech ice dance pairs Natalie Taschlerova and Filip Taschler danced to an experiential, first-of-its-kind climate change-themed free dance program at the Lombardia Trophy 2022 in Italy.

The Czech duo skated to a rich selection of music about nature and environment remixed with climate change news and documentary voiceovers, making history with a program that actively communicated socio-environmental messages and sparked heated discussions on social media.

This marks another artistic innovation since the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics cycle, which allowed lyrics to be used in figure skating programs.

“We were both surprised at first [and] shocked that this video was real,” said Jacob Simon, a retired competitive figure skater. One of his skater friends shared the program clip with him, which has since garnered more than 1,200 interactions on Twitter as of October 18.

“I really like the fact that they are taking this brave step and skating to music that isn’t intuitive or common,” Simon said. He now works as a freelance environmental writer and content creator.

“I think it’s really important to draw attention to the climate crisis,” he added.

Building a contemporary nature medley: A musical critique

Taschlerova/Taschler’s program made a strong case for itself as an exquisite, novel piece, even considering the state-of-the-art precedents that have used themes of nature and voiceovers in the past few years.

Some standouts include the breathtaking Pyeongchang gold medalist program “La Terre vue du ciel (The Earth from Above)” by German pair skaters Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot, and the avant-garde “spoken word poetry” program by French ice dancers Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron during the 2019-2020 season.

“We’ve had this idea since junior year,” Taschlerova and Taschler shared in a Youtube interview. The siblings made their senior debut in 2019. “We try to send some message to the public and to connect with the people a lot.”

Their program featured voiceover remixes from news outlets and documentaries by Conservation International, an American nonprofit environmental organization. The ice dancers borrowed three pieces from Conservation International’s “Nature Is Speaking” campaign, which personify different elements of nature and explain climate change from nature’s perspective.

The music selection accompanying the voiceovers was a unique combination of celebrated contemporary works about nature and environment, including “On The Nature Of The Daylight” by Max Richter, “Run” by Ludovico Einaudi, and “Early Morning Fog” from the renowned documentary “Planet Earth II.” An Ezio Bosso medley was also part of the program, including his pieces “Music for Weather Elements: V. Thunders and Lightnings” and Concerto No. 1 for Violin, Strings and Timpani ‘Esoconcerto’.”

Whereas the use of “Early Morning Fog” from “Planet Earth II” echoed the creative spirits of Savchenko/Massot’s “La Terre vue du ciel (The Earth from Above),” the other selections seized a neat balance of figure skating trends and popular culture.

Einaudi’s and Bosso’s compositions have become popular choices for figure skaters at recent games. At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, five Einaudi pieces were used by nine groups of skaters from six different countries.

Constructing a compelling climate narrative: A detailed component and choreography breakdown

The duo’s program started off with a broadcast news lead: “2014 will go down as the warmest year around the globe in recorded history.”

Then the audience heard the fragile C-major scale piano notes of “On The Nature Of The Daylight,” with the same feeling of hopelessness and despair it carried in the sci-fi movie “Arrival.” Three more news voiceovers seamlessly followed:

“2015 was the hottest year since climate records began.”

“Figures show this July was the single hottest month in recorded history.”

“Australia is sweltering through its hottest spring on record.”

The start of the program was unusual, according to Simon, because it included human voices. But it was also one of the program’s “hitting moments.”

“You hear it, then take a few seconds to register that they are skating to the type of music. That brings attention to the show,” he said.

The ice dancers accompanied the fade-out of voiceovers, transitioning from stand-still arms imitating waves choreography into skating movements. Violin melodies fused in, along with the calm, dire male voice elucidating the definition of climate change:

“Climate change has these consequences for our oceans, our weather, our food sources and our health.”

After that, in the short, powerful declaration—”I am the ocean. I’m water.”—the skaters performed a curve lift that danced to the rest of the voiceover: “Every stream, every cloud, and every raindrop, it all comes back to me.”

The program built up to a climax when the peaceful tunes of “Early Morning Fog” abruptly shifted to a violin allegro cascade of “Concerto No. 1 for Violin, Strings and Timpani ‘Esoconcerto’.” It was accompanied by a dramatic choreography, during which the skaters pushed the judges’ panel in expressions of distraught and anger.

As the skaters came to a stop on ice, they carried out dramatic choreographic push-up movements, while the background voiceover solemnly described the human impacts on glaciers through a warming climate.

“I am ice. I move slowly. I keep the world cool. Well, I used to.”

“[This voiceover] particularly stood out to me, because obviously it’s ice skating,” said Juliana Drozd, a retired ice dancer and a geosciences PhD student at Penn State University.

Following the narration, the program narrative gradually slowed down. “Music for Weather Elements: V. Thunders and Lightnings” slid in while the dancers performed a series of twizzles, which involved rapid, continuous rotations on one foot at the same rhythm while skating forward or backward over the ice.

They ended the set with a spinning movement, and the free dance concluded with the sound of thunder and a voiceover that said, “If nature isn’t kept healthy, humans won’t survive.”

“It was a really strong program, especially for so early in the season,” Drozd said. “Skating wise, it was a very intense program, which I think is something we really need for the music choice.”

“When you have a sibling team, you can’t do a romantic story, because that’s weird,” she added. “So with that, sibling teams have always been kind of pushing the envelope in terms of creativity for their programs.”

Communicating PSA: the competitive stage isn’t something new, but voice-overs are

Despite heated debates on social media over the ice dance program being turned into a public service announcement, the phenomenon isn’t new, according to Daniel Durbin, director of USC Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society.

Durbin said it has been an ongoing trend in many sports, exemplified through Muhammad Ali’s anti-war messages in the 1960s and NFL’s recent PSAs through uniform backs, helmets and zone statements.

However, the skaters’ extensive use of voiceovers did mark an unconventional attempt that became controversial.

When figure skating first became a part of the Olympics in 1908, all music selections had to be classical and without lyrics, except for ice dance programs. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that music selections branched out to lyric-free movie and theater soundtracks.

Since the 2014 post-Olympics season, the International Skating Union has allowed lyrics in music as an attempt to engage a younger audience, which significantly diversified figure skating music genres and inspired the use of popular music. Team USA’s Adam Rippon has skated to Coldplay’s “O,” Madison Chock and Evan Bates have danced to “Fever” by Elvis Presley, and last season, they danced to a Billie Eilish medley.

Eight years into the movement, the integration of lyrics still receives criticism for digression from the classic tradition. The use of pure human speaking, a bolder move, is still extremely rare and gets backlash on social media.

The case of Taschlerova/Taschler is also more particular. Compared with Papadakis/Cizeron’s use of poetry in their program that challenged the boundaries between music and texts, the Taschlerova/Taschler siblings’ program synthesizes voiceovers to present an argument.

Commenting on audience reactions that the program might start an undesired trend of politicizing the ice rink, Drodz said “the fact that the climate is changing is not something that’s really debatable.”

She added that it would be unusual for programs to make a political stance. “Going to the judging system—a lot of your judges are old people, who are probably not on the same stands as you politically,” she said.

Durbin described the situation as “a question between rhetoric and art, [where] there’s some rhetoric in all art, and some art in all rhetoric.”

“The concern that’s being laid out is that rhetoric will overtake art, and it will diminish the aesthetic appeal of the figure skating,” he added.

Proposing ‘cool’ solutions to a warming planet: climate change and sports

Over the past decades, the average daytime temperature at the Winter Olympics host locations has increased from just above freezing at 32°F (0.4°C) in the early and mid 20th century to 46°F (7.8°C) during the 2000-2014 Games.

As warming temperatures have increased the frequency of unreliable winter conditions in the 21 Olympics host locations, it is projected that if global emissions follow a similar trajectory of the last two decades, there would only be one reliable host city left by the end of the century.

Research has found that climate change can shrink skating seasons. Montreal and Toronto are likely to lose more than one-third of their current outdoor skating days, while in Beijing, a one degree rise in temperature could lead to a four day delay in skating-field opening dates and a five day decrease in the operation duration times.

Even though figure skating is an indoor sport not directly impacted by climate change, maintaining an ice rink is carbon intensive.

“Skaters don’t really have an ability to change the energy consumption of the sport as a whole,” said Simon, mentioning that sustainability had been an emerging trend in sports, such as Formula E, the electric equivalent to Formula One.

“But they do have the ability to talk about and bring attention to the overall theme,” he added, “making this decision to skate to a program that is not necessarily what people and judges are expecting to see.”