I Watched (Almost) Every Carmen Program [meta]

[melodytree]

From "Carmen on Ice" to the "Battle of the Carmens" at the 1988 Olympics between Debi Thomas and Katarina Witt, Carmen has become one of the most frequently used pieces of music in skating – perhaps even the most used of all. It's so overused that when a skater announces a new Carmen program, there will inevitably be sighs about "yet another Carmen?".

I got bored one day while waiting for some code to run, and I started to wonder – how many Carmens have there been, anyway?

(This post is a companion to a video, if you want to see every Carmen I could find in five minutes.)

Methodology

I looked through the Carmen list on Figure Skating wiki, searched the figure skater categories on Wikipedia, and did a site search on SkatePedia and the Skate Guard blog. I also stumbled on a couple more by accident on YouTube.

I used the following criteria to determine if a program made the list:

• A significant portion was Carmen or a Carmen remix and


• the program was skated at least once


• at an international competition


• as a competitive program (not an exhibition)


• at the senior elite amateur level

I did not try to search for synchro programs, only singles, pairs, and ice dance.

I included programs that were mostly skated at the junior level, but were used at least once for at a competition where the skater entered as an international senior. There were a couple of cases where I wasn't sure about "significant portion"; I ended up including Peter Liebers's program where Rock Habanera is mixed with other Rock Classical music as a borderline case. In cases where skaters used Carmen for more than one season, I added them separately if they seemed to be distinct programs – for example, Elene Gedevanishivili skated two free programs to Carmen with different music and choreography.

There were 102 programs I found which were actually competed, and two additional programs that were planned and announced by senior-level skaters who ended up not competing that season. Each program was classified by starting season, discipline, and short or long program. I then did my best to find a video of every single program, and succeeded for 92 of them. The rest I could not find even after using multiple sites and sometimes searching in multiple languages.

I watched every single program. After watching a program, I also classified it by costume colors, overall style of program, and gave it my own personal rating from one (bad) to five (amazing even after watching a bunch of Carmen programs in a row). Probably other people would come up with other style classifications, but the ones I used were dramatic, happy drama, romantic tragedy, 'sexy' (quotes are because personally, I find it hard to take most FS attempts at sexiness seriously), serious, and sweetness, as well as bland, if I couldn't see enough of a theme through the program to put it in another category. Some programs were given two styles.

Some pieces of music are used more often than others. In addition, many Carmen programs are sourced from a later composition – the ballet Carmen Suite is particularly popular – or a modern remix. Sections from I, II, III, V, VI, VII, IX, and XIII of Carmen Suite will come up a lot. Habanera and the Toreador song, of course, are used very often.

If you watch very many Carmen programs, there are also a lot of pieces of choreography that you will see over and over and over and over and over. Men put their hands near their hip like a matador cape. Women try to make sliding their hands down their sides five times in a program sexy instead of awkward. Hands go up skirts. Everyone strikes a Spanish pose. Clap along to your own music. You may not be allowed to lie on the ice as you die at the end of your program now, but you can still double over, be caught by a partner, or mime stabbing yourself. Ivett Toth even pretends to shoot herself in the head, while Virtue/Moir buck the trend by having the man die instead of the woman.

Since I had a spreadsheet – I did some analysis. What's going on with Carmen programs in FS? I made some basic categorical graphs and also ran a statistic called Cramer's V to see if there were any associations between categories that might be interesting to graph as well.

First – which skaters used Carmen for the most seasons? The winner is Kevin Alves, who did one season with a Carmen SP and three seasons in a row with a Carmen FS. Tying for second place are Yasuharu Nanri and Viktor Petrenko, both of whom reused Carmen programs across three seasons, as well as Valentina Marchei. She skated to it twice as a singles skater and once as a pair skater.

Secondly, number of programs by season (all seasons are listed by their starting year):

The stars denote Olympic years – I was curious to see if there would be an obvious trend, as it is often said that skaters tend to choose safer programs for the Olympics, and Carmen is as conventional as it gets.

The earliest Carmen I could find was performed by Charlie Tickner in 1975-6 and 1976-7. Peak Carmen in my dataset was 2001-2, an Olympic year, with ten Carmens, though 2017-8 (another Olympic year) and 2014-5 tied for second with nine Carmens each. The last year in my dataset with no Carmen programs is 2003-4. The number of Carmen programs has dropped in the last couple of seasons, but it is too early to tell whether skaters are starting to leave Carmen behind for other music, or if it is a temporary dip.

The graph makes it appear that the number of Carmens has increased dramatically since before the year 2000; however, it is important to keep in mind that it is much easier to find information on the music used by more recent skaters. Nowadays, there may well be a full table on the Wikipedia page of a low-level skater from a small skating country listing all the music they've ever used. Worlds winners from the 80s probably don't have that listed, and it may be difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. Generally, we only remember the really popular skaters and the really standout programs, and even those may not be written somewhere like Wikipedia.

Because of this, it's impossible to tell from the data if Carmen really has become more popular over time, or if its use hasn't changed (or has even declined!) but now it is easier to find music information for more skaters.

Next, who skates to Carmen? What does the number of women vs men vs dancers vs pairs look like?

...mostly women (47 programs) with men at about half the number (28), and dance (18) and pairs (11) trailing. There are a lot more single skaters than dance and pair teams, but not that many more women than men, so while the dance and pairs numbers may be the result of smaller numbers of skaters in those disciplines, I suspect that women are more likely to choose Carmen to skate to than men.

Which program length do they choose for Carmen?

Skaters are almost twice as likely to use Carmen for a long program than a short program (or short dance, original set pattern, rhythm dance...). I'm not really sure why that would be. Maybe the music is more suitable for cutting to the time requirements of a free skate, or skaters prefer a more dramatic free program?

If we look at this by season:

It appears that overall, skaters are generally using Carmen much more often for their free skates nowadays, but that pattern doesn't appear before 2006 or so. It's possible that this is some kind of artifact of the data or that it's always been the case that skaters prefer using Carmen for free programs, but if not, I still have no idea why this would be the case. And also, this pattern only seems to show up for singles!

Dance and Pairs use Carmen for long and short programs in more or less the same proportion. Again, no idea why; I would have thought that maybe ice dancers would have avoided using it for rhythm/short dances because of music constraints, but I guess you could probably find a Carmen piece or remix for any requirement.

That mystery aside, let’s talk costumes. What colors do skaters use on their Carmen costumes?

If you've ever watched skating or seen Carmen, you're probably not surprised that red and black are the most popular colors. There are lots of black and red dresses, sometimes complete with a red flower in the hair. (Shout-out to Fumie Suguri for being the only women in my dataset who wore pants for her program.) Gold and white are often used for matador-style costumes for the men. However, other colors are worn as well, if more rarely – from orange and maroon, to blue and pink, and even teal. Occasionally, a skater might wear a creative Carmen costume with no red or black on it at all! If we look at the color combinations used:

Red and black, red and black plus other colors, and red or black by themselves predominate. I excluded the unique combinations from this graph so it would be readable, because there were a lot of them. The unique combinations were:
red, black, and grey
red, black, grey, and white
red and white
blue, red, and black
silver and black
purple, gold, black, and white
yellow, red, and black
silver, black, and orange
maroon and white
orange
blue and black
black, black, and grey
red and silver
maroon, pink, and yellow
red and purple
gold and black
white, black, and silver
...and the striking teal and orange worn by Rin Nitaya.

Does everyone in all disciplines wear the same colors?

Women really love a good red. And are the most likely to wear silver, and the only ones to wear orange. Men are more likely to wear grey, white, and especially gold. White seems oddly popular in dance, for some reason; there's a lot of white shirts for the guys, if they're not wearing a matador suit. And if we look at color combos by discipline:

...women really really love their red and black. The only man I saw wearing just red and black was Jiří Bělohradský, who wore a simple red shirt with black trousers. Men are much more likely add gold or gold and white. In my dataset, only women have worn all-red costumes. Maybe if colored trousers come back into fashion for the men....

Carmen has some very dramatic music, but that doesn't mean you have to skate a dramatic program to it. There are softer parts, too! But what are the style trends as I classified them?

I had difficulty fitting the labels into the graph without them overlapping, so here is the key:
D!! = Dramatic
HD = Happy Drama
Ser = Serious
RT = Romantic Tragedy

There are a lot of programs with some kind of drama, and the most common combination I found was drama and 'sexy', though I more commonly classified programs with only one style. Looking at styles individually:

Drama is still by far the most popular (38 programs), with happy drama and 'sexy' programs tying at 20 programs each. The least popular styles are serious and sweet, with only eight programs each. There are more somber and more lighthearted pieces of Carmen music – the second intermezzo, for instance, is very sweet – but they tend to more frequently be a bridge between more dramatic pieces rather than the main focus of a program.

Naturally, it is difficult to do a romantic tragedy by oneself (or if anyone did try to, I didn't pick up on it). I also might've been harsher on classifying the pairs. Women do more happily smilely Carmens, though a few men have, and there is not a single men's program in my dataset that I put under 'sexy', although the occasional program had single movements that I might have interpreted that way.

The door is open, guys. Red costume, sexy sexy male Carmen. It'll be unique. While I'm at it, there's also a lack of women skating as matadors. Just saying. There is still unexplored territory in the world of Carmen programs!

And finally, how did I personally rate all those programs?

My average rating was 2.7 out of five, or slightly below average; I disliked more programs than I really liked and hated more programs than I loved. It's hard to say much about this distribution without a comparable sample of non-Carmen programs, but I do feel like I tend to be a little more positive than this when watching figure skating! Probably watching so many programs with the same music and themes and costume colors close together didn't help.

There were many programs that I enjoyed, but only four which I rated a five – my favorites were Charlie Tickner, Debi Thomas, Katarina Witt, and Bestemianova and Bukin.