10 Ways to Enjoy Holiday Performances
The holidays can be a magical time of year! Families get together, friends show appreciation, and most of the time the holidays are filled with happiness and gratefulness.
Holiday performances and shows are also great parts of the holidays. Here are 10 ways to enjoy holiday performances, whether by attending or performing yourself.
Photo Credit: Photo by Pat McDonald at Flickr Creative Commons.
Recovering from Mistakes in Competition
This week I want to talk about competition mistakes because eventually every skater ends up falling or tripping in a competition program. The best skaters will recover immediately, and they’ll usually forget about the mistake quickly.
I’ve found the best way to forget about the mistake is by transferring your focus to the next element in the program. If you dwell on the mistake, that is when you tend to lose focus and possibly make many more mistakes.
You can develop mistake recovery by practicing like a competition. When you make a mistake in practice, you should resume your program with the same expression and energy as before the fall.
Here’s an example of 2010 Olympic silver medalists and 2011 World champions Charlie White and Meryl Davis at a recent ISU Grand Prix competition in Russia. You see Charlie take a significant stumble early in the program, but he quickly resumes composure, getting right back in sync with Meryl. This causes the audience to forget about the mistake and keeps any negative marks by the judges minimal.
Top 10 Ways to Perform for a Cause
Most people have had a family member, friend, or somebody they know who has had breast cancer or another serious illness. When you’ve experienced something like this directly or indirectly, the cause has a much more powerful impact on your life.
October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I feel very strongly about this cause as my grandmother is a breast cancer survivor. Thanks to early detection, she didn’t have to go through the worst ordeal. But no matter how treatable a cancer is, it is still very serious and affects families in a personal way.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a fantastic way to get people involved in the cause. However, this is a cause that is worth being involved in year-round.
Here’s my list of top 10 ways to perform for breast cancer awareness:
Image Credit: Image by Mark Menzies at Flickr Creative Commons.
2011 Christmas Show Time
2007 Viejas Christmas Show
We’re already back at the annual Viejas Casino Christmas show time! Chea co-directs and produces the show with our friend Michelle Ford. This is the 5th year of the show, which is held in the middle of the outlet center by the Christmas tree. The shows are on November 10th and 11th at 6pm. It’s free to watch. Friday is the busiest night, but Thursday has the seating reserved for the tribe. So it’s standing room only on Thursday. I’ve starred in the show the last four years, but I chose not to do it this year because of lack of time in my schedule.
If you or your child will be performing in a Christmas show this year, check out our previous posts with lots of show skating tips:
Top 7 Show Essentials by Christina
Is Performing on Ice the Same as Theatre? by Christina
Christmas Show Pointers by Will
Top Tip for Skating Performances and Competitions by Christina
Feel the Love of Performance by Christina
Why You Should Arrive Early for Skating Performances by Christina
Show Skating Inspiration by Will
Skating to the Music by Will
Top 5 Performance Reminders for Skating Competitions
Christina Chitwood and Mark Hanretty performing the Finnstep at the 2009 European Championships (Photo by Liz Chastney)
With regionals having recently ended, competitions for our students coming up the next two weekends, sectionals and nationals coming up, and the international competition season continuing, I want to provide some tips for any competitor, any level. Some of these may seem basic, but even the top competitors in the world sometimes forget to do them.
1. SMILE! 
Unless your coach has asked you to use a different expression to portray your program, you should be smiling!
Halloween and Skating Costumes
With Halloween coming up, everyone is thinking about costumes. In figure skating, costumes are important throughout the year. For technical events in skating, I feel that while a good costume can help the judges remember the skater, strong skating is much more important than just having an elaborate dress.
However, for events such as artistic and spotlight where the focus is on originality and music interpretation, costumes are much more important to the overall performance quality. As a rule of thumb, it’s useful for the judges to be able to tell what type of music the skater will be performing to by looking at their costume before the music starts. It’s also nice for spotlight events to have a surprise layer of costume underneath the first layer or some other unique twist to the costume.
Here’s a Halloween show video with some good tricks in it. If you’re looking for Halloween costume ideas for skating, there are some interesting ones in the video!
