melodytree

Swan Lake is one of the most famous and popular ballets in existence, and its music has been commonly used in figure skating programs for decades. Personally, it's my favorite big warhorse, and after doing a project where I collected together every Carmen program I could find, I thought it would be interesting to do the same for Swan Lake.

This post is a companion to a video, if you'd like to see every Swan Lake I could find in five minutes.

Methodology and Overview

As with the Carmen project, I searched for programs by checking the Figure Skating Wiki's Swan Lake page; searched Wikipedia for figure skaters with the terms Swan Lake, Black Swan, and the names of the specific folk dances; searched SkatePedia; and searched the Skate Guard blog. I also stumbled upon a few by accident in old newsgroup discussions or newspaper articles, and then found the older program listings on Frogs on Ice and Tadaaki Masuda's (archived) site. (Of course, I noticed that there were even more Carmen programs listed on it from the 90s that I hadn't seen elsewhere... but that project is done and final.)

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

A significant portion (> 1 minute) was Swan Lake or a Swan Lake remix
the program was skated at least once
at an international competition
as a competitive program (not an exhibition)
at the senior amateur level in one of the four non-synchro disciplines

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. In cases where skaters used Swan Lake for more than one season, I added them separately if they seemed to be distinct programs.

Please note that I only searched for programs up through and including the 2019-2020 season. I started this project before the 2020-2021 season began; also, those criteria up there would be tricky to apply to a nearly nonexistent season.

(Rudy Galindo performing as the evil wizard of Swan Lake on his way to winning a very emotional US title.)

I found 104 programs. While this is equal to the number of Carmen programs I found previously, it only reached this number after I scoured through the old fan listings of music choices from the 80s and 90s that I hadn't known of before. It looks like if I also counted the previously unknown-to-me Carmen programs on those pages, the scale would tip further back again. However, without a definitive listing of every music choice used by every skater, it's hard to know for sure which has been used more.

102 of those were actually competed; there were two programs that were planned and announced by senior-level skaters who ended up not competing that season, which were included in the analysis where relevant. 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 94 of them. The rest I could not find even after using multiple video-hosting sites, in some cases searching in multiple languages, and looking for original competition streams or broadcasts.

The odd one out: I did find a video of Sonja Henie, who skated the first Swan Lake program I could find reference to, for her free skate in the 1928 Olympics. However, the footage was chopped up and had new music overlaid on it, and it was difficult to tell if the footage was taken from her performance, practicing, screwing around for the camera... I included this program in the companion video and in the analysis, but not as one I watched, because it was impossible to evaluate the video.

With the programs I could find video for, I watched every single one. After watching a program, I classified it by costume colors worn in the specific performance I watched, overall theme of program, whether it was a Black Swan program or not, and gave it my own personal rating from one (bad) to five (amazing). For programs that had a woman skating, I also added whether her costume had a tutu and/or a feathered skirt – either a skirt with fabric cut in the shape of feathers, or actual feathers making up a large portion of the skirt.

For themes, the classifications I came up with were:
Drama – loud, emphatic, bombastic, often but not always on the darker side, usually featuring the more dramatic pieces of the main theme
Happy – lighthearted, smiley, sometimes on the gentler side, might feature the music from the party scenes of the ballet
Romantic – for pairs/ice dance, when there seemed to a focus on romantic gestures and dance movements between the two skaters
Folk – usually set to one of the national dance pieces and with costumes to match; typically, the Russian dance is used, and sometimes the Spanish dance – not sure if I ever heard the Neapolitan or Hungarian dances
Modern – usually but not necessarily set to a modern remix and featuring movements that draw from more recent dance styles rather than ballet; the most famous example of this is uncle Dai's Cyber Swan
Bland – I couldn't find a strong theme in the skating itself

A program could be given one or two different styles.

Takahashi took hip-hop lessons to integrate the dance style into his unique step sequences, rather than focusing on Swan Lake's ballet origins.

As with Carmen, some pieces of music are much more represented than others, such as pieces featuring the main leitmotif, the Russian and Spanish dances, and the famous '32 foutte' pas de deux music. There was one very well-known part of the ballet that was left out: I don't think I heard the famous 'Dance of the Cygnets' in a single program, which is an outrage considering that it's one of the best pieces in the whole ballet! (Okay, perhaps it's not suited to skating – what do I know? Or maybe it's been used in cute junior/novice programs. I wonder if a synchro team has ever used it.)

There are also several staple movements that one tends to see in Swan Lake programs. Of course, there's flapping your arms up and down like a swan – some people do this more beautifully than others. You can do it during a spiral, while turning in place on your toepicks, while building up speed with crossovers, during a pivot, in the middle of a spin....

Lots of skaters add toe work, sometimes in an imitation of bourrées ('floating' small steps on pointe). It's also common to round one or two arms above the head for some movements, or at least while doing some crossovers, and so are split jumps and dramatic spirals. For folk dance programs especially, expect a lot of hands on hips and small spinning hops across the ice.

Berezhnaya & Sikharulidze's program has a good example of a Very Dramatic spiral.

You can see my spreadsheet of all this for yourself here. Once it was complete, I had fun doing basic statistics on it and making graphs.

Results

First, let's start with some basic numbers – what does the number of Swan Lake programs look like season by season? (Please note that all seasons on these year graphs are listed by starting year of the season and that I excluded Henie's program from them for readability.)

Besides Henie's program, the earliest ones I found were Starbuck and Shelly's pairs free skate from the 1970 and 1971 seasons. There is at least one program every year in my data set from 1993 onward. The most Swan Lake-y year was 2011-2012, with 10 programs, and the skaters who I found used Swan Lake the most were Korobeynikova, Malinina, Park Yeonjun, and Zakharanka, who all skated to it for three seasons.

The stars indicate Olympic seasons; it's commonly said that skaters will use 'safe' music for the Olympic season, so I wanted to see if there was an obvious pattern, which there doesn't seem to be at a glance. If anything, it looks like the number of Swan Lake programs was below average for the 2002, 2006, and 2010 Olympic seasons, though I don't think there's an overall pattern.

As with the Carmen programs, it initially looks like the number of Swan Lake programs has increased over time. However, remember that it's far easier to find music information for even lower-level international skaters nowadays, while music choices from the 70s and 80s are mostly only remembered from quite famous programs and skaters, and even Olympic medalists from those eras may not have a Wikipedia box listing all of their music for every season.

That being said, there is a rather large jump from the 2010-2011 season to the 2011-2012 season, and this has an easy explanation: the movie Black Swan came out in late 2010. It was popular and used the ballet Swan Lake as a central motif, so many skaters have used the music from it in the years since it came out. In fact, how many post-2010 programs are Black Swan programs?

Just over half of those ten 2011-2012 programs are specifically based on Black Swan. There's an interesting pattern here – the proportion of Black Swan programs shrinks while the number of Swan Lake programs grows, until none of the ones I found from 2014 specified Black Swan. Then, the number suddenly evens out again.

This was my dad's suggested explanation – everyone wants to do Black Swan after seeing the movie, or at least Swan Lake. Then they see a lot of other people using Black Swan in 2011 and want to stand out more, so they go back to normal Swan Lake, until nobody is using Black Swan and it suddenly seems like a more unique choice again and the two balance out. This might be totally off base, but it's one idea.

Is there a pattern in who skates to it by discipline? Yes, a clear one:

Girls do Swan Lake. Which I guess makes some sense as the swans are almost always played by women, and you're probably going to watch Swan Lake for, well, the swans, not the prince or the evil wizard or the court jester, no matter how great their dancing is. It is true that there are more women doing singles than men (and more singles than pairs and ice dancers) – but not that many more.

As for why dance is noticeably lower than even pairs, there may be an explanation in some commentary I heard over Wighton & Dowding's performance at 1979 Worlds that led me to look a couple things up: "The fact that it's music all from Swan Lake, the ballet, has caused a lot of stir here and it was the first question the judges put to [the referee] when the judges met for their initial meeting. [...] Yes, it is valid, ballet music is allowed."

I'm not very familiar with the history of ice dance, so this had me scratching my head – people were skating to it a decade before this program; why wouldn't it be allowed? But ice dance evolved out of ballroom dance traditions, and the formula for the free dance at the time was to splice together three different music pieces with different rhythms, not to have a continuous theme or to skate to ballet music. This program might have gotten ballet music banned from ice dance for a few years (I'm not entirely clear on this point) until other revolutionary ice dance teams such as Torvill and Dean came along and offered more challenges to this formula. So, this aspect of ice dance may have made it less attractive for ice dancers until recently; the next Swan Lake ice dance program I found wasn't until 1998.

Do skaters tend to use it more for short or long programs?

There are 62 free programs to 42 short programs. Perhaps that's a coincidence, but there also initially appears to be a pattern if we look at it by season, where free skates predominate among earlier programs:

This could be because skaters started using Swan Lake for free programs before short programs for whatever reason (maybe it suits a free skate to be more dramatic?). However, this may be an illusion; I think in general free skates tend to be remembered more, especially before the days of video streaming and uploads. What did Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas skate to in 1988? Carmen, of course... and for their short programs? Torvill and Dean did the famous Bolero... and for their OSP? Or compare the view numbers on John Curry's Olympic free skate and (once you've scrolled past a few uploads of his FS) his SP at the same competition. There are exceptions to this, of course, but I think the inherent drama of the free program, which decides who wins, may make it easier to remember, and thus to bother to write down years later on the internet.

If we look at it by discipline instead:

I will note that most of the pre-1995 programs I found are for women, and only two of those pre-1995 women's programs are short programs, so if the above logic holds, that may explain the difference for women. As for the difference in dance, if it is a real one, perhaps Swan Lake simply doesn't have a lot of music that fits various short/rhythm dance requirements?

Next, let's look at the themes of the programs, as I categorized them. First all of the combos:

For readability at this image size, I needed to abbreviate most of the category names; Dra = Drama, Hap = Happy, Rom = Romantic, Mod = Modern, and Bla = Bland.

I found most programs to be primarily either Dramatic or Happy, with everything else in lower numbers. I think this makes sense given the most famous pieces of music from Swan Lake easily fit in those categories, and with singles programs being so much more common than dance/pairs. For all categories except 'romantic', I decided more programs to be purely of that category rather than in combination with others. If we look at the themes individually:

Drama and Happy remain on top, followed by smaller numbers of Romantic programs and an equal number of Modern and Folk ones, and Bland ones, thankfully, in last place.

How does theme vary by discipline?

Drama, Happy, and Modern seem to be in similar proportions for men and women; however, I didn't code any pairs or dance programs as modern! (Which isn't to say none of them had any modern or non-traditional elements at all – at least a couple did – but they were eclipsed by more prominent themes such as drama or romance when I was deciding how to categorize them.)

Folk programs have only been done by women and pairs in my data set. I can see why for pairs – the folk dances in the ballet each have a pas de deux – but the absence of men and dance from this category is more of a head-scratcher for me. Do teenage boys not want to get dressed up in traditional-style costumes as often as teenage girls? Is is a coincidence because of the lower numbers of men (and ice dancers) doing Swan Lake?

Now, let's talk costumes – first, I would like to shout out a couple of skaters who did Swan Lake programs and then wore costumes evoking birds that are not swans:

Pervushkina in a very pretty but very clearly peafowl-inspired costume.

Volosozhar wears a fairly typical kind of Swan Lake costume; her partner Trankov has decided to go as an owl.

Or you can just skate as I AM A SWAN:

(This is Ann Patrice McDonough, and I am kind of sad that it sounds like she may have been pressured to wear that by her mother, because that is a costume you should wear with pride and no self-consciousness because this is figure skating and there are no fashion rules. I hope she didn't mind it!)

Next, what colors are skaters putting into their Swan Lake costumes? While it can sometimes be tricky to categorize colors, especially on older videos with color issues, I did my best. Only the main colors of each costume were counted. I expected 'black and white' and 'black' would be the most popular choices, and...

Yep, 'black and white' is up there, but it's after 'black and silver'! Lots of silver detailing on black costumes. Pure black ties for third place with just white, and black and white and also grey or silver.

This chart excludes all unique color combinations, because there are thirty of them and they would not make for a very readable graph. Here's a sample of some of them:
Light-blue, Deep-blue, Silver
Green, Gold, Black
Red
Pink, White, Grey, Black

Starbuck and Shelley wore red for their program – by the way, note the lack of boards in the background! What a view those front-row audience seats must have had!

If we split the colors up individually:

I split blue into dark and light blue (they are labeled 'DBlue' and 'LBlue' on the graph because of space issues). I expected a large amount of black (almost every man will be wearing black pants, and plenty of the women wore black as well), as well as white and the shades in-between, though I thought there might be more blue. Red and green mostly featured on folk-dance costumes, though they also showed up in other types of programs on occasion:

Kim Yelim wore a gorgeous costume in an unusual combination of black, green, and dark blues for her Black Swan program.

Brown and purple were the rarest colors, used only twice each, the latter notably by Yuzuru Hanyu:

Breaking it down by discipline again, first looking at color combinations:

Silver and black was the only common (more than 3 appearances in the data set) combination used by more than one man. Breaking down individual colors by discipline:

Black is the most common color or everyone, except in pairs, where it is tied with white for the most common color. Women are more often seen in the less common colors – again, this could be an effect of the disproportionate number of women skating to Swan Lake, or it could be that women are more likely to be experimental with costumes. The uptick in red from pairs comes from Folk-style programs; 4 out of the 5 pairs who did Spanish/Russian dance programs wore red.

While tutu skirts have been only a sporadic costume element – I counted nine across all disciplines, including both classical (sticky-outy), bell-shaped, and romantic tutu-inspired ones like Sinitsina's up there – feather skirts have been a more constant fashion trend through the years:

I found three ladies wearing both feathers and a tutu: Baiul, Pervushkina, and Totmianina. There also initially appears to be another set of trends at odds when we look at these costume choices by discipline, where the percentage of women wearing tutu skirts is lowest for women and highest for dance, while the opposite is true for feather skirts:

However, it looks like these are both coincidences (a Fisher's test didn't find any significant difference in feather or tutu numbers between disciplines).

And lastly, my personal ratings of programs:

My average rating was 2.94 – almost right in the middle of my rating scale. While this is slightly higher than my average rating for Carmen programs, a quick t-test indicates that this difference is not a significant one.

There's a lot of good Swan Lake out there, but here are a few of my personal favorites from the bunch:
Shizuka Arakawa, 2002 and 2003 SP
Oksana Baiul, 1993 FS
Sasha Cohen, 2003 FS
Fusar-Poli & Margaglio, 1998 SD
Rudy Galindo, 1995 FS (watch the Nationals version!)
Ilinykh & Katsalapov, 2013 FD
Ilia Klimkin, 2003 SP,
Sinitsina & Katsalapov, 2015 SD
Ondrej Spiegl, 2014 and 2015 SP
Daisuke Takahashi, 2007 SP
Wang & Liu, 2019 FD

If you want to explore more, here's the link to the spreadsheet again: link

Thanks for reading :)