Week 23: 'They came from Nottingham'

Wonder spawned in: 1984
Wondered into being by: Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean
Wonderspan: 6 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click 'full screen' and make sure you can hear the sound.

Sarajevo - besieged in the war of the former Yugoslavia.  But before then it was famous for something else - hosting the Winter Olympics.  It's 1984.  Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are about to perform what is still regarded as the most accomplished ice dance ever - their Boléro routine.

Ravel's Boléro is 17 minutes long; an Olympic ice dance could be no more than four.  According to fellow British competitor Nicky Slater, Torvill and Dean had the piece abridged to just 4 minutes, 18 seconds, which was the minimum the arrangers could manage without butchering the music.  What to do with those illegal 18 seconds, then?  Well, the clock was only started once the dancers began to skate, so the pair began their dance by kneeling on the ice.

From this beginning, the energetic freedom and elegance of these two dancers is obvious.  Most ice dances are packed with flashy spins and jumps to impress the judges -- typically this forced showiness gets shoehorned into the routine with the rest of the dance reduced to a series of preludes to these peaks.  The Bolero routine breaks this rule; rather than dancy athletics, we are given an athletic dance.  The choreography so closely follows the music that it feels like the dance and the music belong to each other.  After just a few seconds, the audience is hooked.

Torvill and Dean may be dancing for the judges, but they seem to be dancing first for the music, as if they are right inside it.  As they follow Ravel's insistent repetitions, pulses and transitions, they seem so at ease with each other that we could forget they are skating at all -- their bodies appear to me like like two rivers converging and diverging through the space.  It is as if through touch alone, each knows the other completely.  At one point, with her back to her partner, Jayne Torvill dives forward and away from him, trusting entirely to his perfectly timed catch, which seems to come from nowhere and melts just as quickly into something else -- it looks as easy to them as walking.

I have taught dance and this mutual, bodily listening -- 'connection' as it's called in the jargon -- is the most difficult thing to convey.  Unless you know what to look for you can't point it out, nor can you explain it in abstract terms.  The only way to teach it is to get partnered dancers to close their eyes in turn.  They have to stop thinking, stop looking, and start feeling the connection that their bodies have with each other.  The only way I can try to describe it in words is that once you're connected you no longer feel separate; if you still feel separate, you haven't got it yet.  Once you do know what it is you can see connection in others and it looks completely different from dancers just going through the motions of a practised routine.

For their Boléro dance the judges gave Torvill and Dean 11 perfect 6.0 scores for artistic impression, guaranteeing them the gold medal.  The routine has since suffered, like anything else would, from being overplayed to the point of becoming a twee cliché in the national imagination.  But look beyond that and the 1984 performance still shines as an achingly beautiful, technically flawless dance.  It is as close as I’ve ever seen to two human beings flying with the same fearless ease of the birds.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2zbbN4OL98

Were they lovers?  They say they were not but how, then, could they dance as lovers would?  It is indeed a wonder!
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