Elaine Meinel Supkis
March 28, 2006
All performers know that after all the practice and training, to pull off a great performance on stage, one has to be 100% positive that it is pleasurable to be on stage. In other words, despite the butterflies in the stomach and the fear of failure, the minute one steps out into the public eye, one has to be confident and filled with the joy of becoming something more than a mere person, to be transformed into something magical. Figure skater Sasha Cohen has lost this.
As she’d done in Turin, Cohen on Saturday fumbled away a lead and a gold medal. The 21-year-old from Corona del Mar fell once and botched the landings of three other jumps in her long program, creating an opening that 16-year-old Kimmie Meissner seized with the exuberance of an athlete who has no reason to regard pressure as an enemy.
Meissner landed two triple-triple jump combinations in a compelling and near-flawless routine to soar past Cohen and Japan’s Fumie Suguri and win the world title, a blessing for a sport desperate for fresh faces and transcendent performances. Meissner, sixth in Turin, earned a personal-best 129.70 points for her “Queen of Sheba” program and an overall total of 218.33, eclipsing Suguri’s 209.74 and Cohen’s 208.88.
Figure Skating is a difficult art. It is very dynamic, the nature of the art has everything to do with speed, one has to exploit the nature of swift movement which means responding like a bird in a windstorm, the body automatically curving or twisting, beating the wings at the right time to swoop and dive. The concious mind can’t direct the balancing or manipulations because it thinks too slow, these things have to be natural despite their unnaturalness, they have to come seemingly instinctually.
Good string players practice the scales religiously so the fingers automatically remember where to go to produce various notes. If one has to think about where to put the fingers while performing, the sound is tense and without feeling.
And here is the core of the matter: the mind must be filled with enough confidence and certainty it no longer thinks about what to do but instead, plugs into the vast reservoir of emotional feelings and using these forces, yields to them and allows feelings of sadness, joy, sexual delight, anger, affection, all the wide variety of feelings that dwell inside of us and which we work hard to suppress, they find an outlet in dance, music, art. This is what we call “the Dionysian Ecstasy” and it works best hand in hand with the intellectual, carefully plotted “Apollonian Rationalism”. When welded together, great art is possible.
For Cohen, all roads lead back to her failure to fortify her balletic grace and classic spirals with an unwavering focus. Her “Romeo and Juliet” program ranked fourth behind Meissner, Suguri and Elena Sokolova of Russia, erasing the 3.62-point lead she’d built over Suguri and 5.58-point margin over Meissner.
“I still haven’t found that automatic robot to pump out perfect performances. That’s something I’m still searching for,” said Cohen, who preceded Meissner in the final group and was beneath the stands of the Pengrowth Saddledome when the crowd of 9,843 saluted Meissner.
A tense, at odds with herself, Sasha Cohen.
I know, online, a friend of Sasha who now won’t talk to me because I asked him to pass to her my writings about fear and figure skating. I think the girl is unreachable at this point and doomed to a life of frustration and failure. Instead of coolly working on her tools and techniques, she has the plugs backwards. She is expressing her feelings while doing the scales, so to speak. Namely, before running through her jumps and turns, she first lets her feelings flow and these are increasingly uptight feelings of anger and frustration.
This tenses up the body and prevents it from naturally letting go and instinctively doing things. If she is searching for a “robot” to proxy for her and perform while she is detached and hiding within her emotional shell, she is doomed. Who will get pleasure watching a robot with rigid face torment itself trying to churn out motion?
If I were her coach, I would have her take off the skates and take a vacation. I would suggest hiking in the mountains and meditating with nature. Then learn a new skill, in this case, flamenco dancing, only not with a teacher!
She has to unlearn choreography and simply grasp the sense of music and the body and let herself locate that magic box deep inside, Pandora’s chest that is filled with all those many troublesome emotions including the last and most important: hope.
I am suggesting flamenco because I have done it. With Spanish gypsies. One stands still as a tree, eyes closed, in the middle of the floor, listening and breathing. One waits for the flame to awaken and it always starts as a small spark. One arm lifts, the eyes open. The head turns. The eyes close again. The chest heaves and one sighs and a foot moves forwards. Looking backwards as the feet turn the opposite direction, the other arm rises. All the curves of the arms are inwards, towards the heart, down to the vagina, up over the head, attention moves from glancing at the singers and musicians to looking down at the hands then out towards the open world and then closing the eyes again.
When the full flaming spirit is on fire, when lightning bolts rattle the windows, the stamping feet, the skirts flying in huge curves, the arms swords slashing, the full fury gripping every part of the body, rage, frustration, adoration and lust, yes, raw sex, pours out, from the finger tips to the toes, electrical energy wracks the entire body and one feels love and loss all at once, grief then takes over, pain, and the dance slows down, acceptance of the hard lessons of life, enfolding the greatness of Mata Dolorosa, a shimmering, religious light suffuses the dancer who brings all the watchers and singers and musicians together into one beating heart and the dance ends.
At no point does the dancer calculate anything, that kills it. This is why flamenco, professionally, fails. It bores quickly when it is all surface and show. I am not a great or even middling dancer. But I can tap into the magic core of dance thanks perhaps to my tragic past. Sasha Cohen has a splendid tool, a perfect body, an immensely trained entity and she can’t harness it because she is afraid to feel her true emotions.
She isn’t alone which is why the art of figure skating will always be an art not a mere sport.
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