Listening to Skating on Cassette Tape: The Ephemerality of Live Performance

On Struck Matches and the Heartbreaking Power of Liveness

I can still remember Scott Hamilton’s live coverage of figure skating at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics—the particular cadence of his voice when a skater would land a jump. I remember the pitch of Sarah Hughes’ scream when she learned she had just won the Olympics. The experience is entirely auditory in my memory because, like most kids in the early 2000s, I still had a cassette tape player.

Remember those? Somehow I’d tracked down a radio station playing audio of the network’s live stream of figure skating, and then recorded it. On a cassette tape. Maybe we recorded the live television coverage too—I’m not sure.¹ Cassette tapes were more my domain, and having them meant I could sit in my bed and listen and re-listen, over and over again, to my favorite skaters’ programs. To listen to figure skating! Can you imagine?

Which feels, weirdly, kind of right, since any sense of concreteness about those moments of skating performance are, well, gone. Sure, some skaters’ performances were recorded, and now we can watch them on YouTube, even two decades on.

But the spirit of the moment—the dynamic between skater and audience, the resulting sensations, the particular way toe picks tapped the ice and the audiences’ applause and the temperature of the arena that day—all of those are gone.

In the most recent episode (Episode 6: Tour Life and Programs That Never Were) of their podcast, The Runthrough, former Team USA members/Olympians Ashley Wagner and Adam Rippon explore this very phenomenon. In the midst of discussing choreography and getting new programs, the duo inadvertently insist upon the role of the audience in the dynamic of how a performance is received: through a live audience, that is. Ashley Wagner recalled asking herself ‘How is the audience going to like this program? Is it actually a performance, or is it just a competitive program?’

‘The energy of skating something in front of people is so different from…showing [a program] at your rink.’ It’s a ‘completely different feeling,’ muses Adam Rippon. There is live, instantaneous feedback in performance.

This is still one of my favorite things about competitive figure skating: the fact that programs unfold live and uncapturable, moment to moment. 

This is of course true of theatre, too, and perhaps one of the reasons I came to appreciate the art form after two decades of skating. It is, at its core, ephemeral.

Directors and actors and designers spend upwards of six to eight weeks or more preparing a show that will only ever be staged a small amount of times before closing. All evidence of the production ever having happened—the costumes, the actors that filled them, the set, the audience—are gone. The show might persist in your mind for a while after you’ve left, but even that will eventually begin to fade.

As one of those artists, I know this can be hard to grapple with; there is a reason actors have post-show let-downs.

And yet, as an audience member, this is also the particular appeal of performance: you know that what you experience will only last for the time you are there to witness it before it is gone. That kind of impermanence is rare these days, with social media and our need to constantly document our daily lives.

Performance theorist Diana Taylor’s book The Archive and the Repertoire best addresses this dichotomy of liveness and fixedness.

Taylor asks, ‘Is performance that which disappears, or that which persists?’ (xvii). In skating, it is both. It persists through a tangible record: points are logged, PDFs of program components are posted, and scores are rewarded. And yet the glimmers of magic in the actual, live performances—those are lost forever. They vanish as soon as a skater steps off the ice.

Here’s a personal example of the feeling of this phenomenon in the real world: during the summer of 2016, when I was living in the UK, I saw one of the best show I have seen to date: Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe, directed by Maria Aberg at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon. There were exquisitely choreographed dances, an original score, and—most excitingly—you never knew who was going to play the two lead roles.

Every night, the two men playing Faustus and Mephistopheles would walk on stage, each strike a match, and whoever’s went out first would play the ill-fated Faustus for that performance.

They did this every night. For the entire run. It was a conceptual approach that only works in the theatre, and it spoke to tone and theatrical genre in a way I have not seen since. Faustus was a downright thrill to watch—as theatre is supposed to be—and I wanted to keep re-living it.

I did re-live it once, actually. (I saw the show twice.) And then a few weeks after the show closed, I got in touch with the gift shop at the RSC theatre to buy a filmed version of the show. ‘They didn’t film this one,’ I was told. There was no evidence of this production ever having excited, outside of reviews and interviews and a short trailer. I was upset for a long time after that. But it’s also, to this day, what still makes the production so special to me. So memorable, ironically.

And this is how I am thinking about figure skating lately—as an ephemeral event, inherently uncapturable.

Sure, it’s true: events, and even practices, are often recorded. We’re constantly sharing our personal skating journeys on social media, and Jordan Cowan of On Ice Perspectives does a particularly excellent job of capturing skating—not just the technical elements and movement of the body, but the mood of the program. This is also important work in a time when television and streaming networks are not keen to share coverage for longer than a day or two after an event has ended.²

When I asked Jordan recently if he learns a skater’s choreography beforehand so he doesn’t need to worry about where to skate while holding a heavy camera and gimbal, his answer was telling: ‘Knowing the music is more helpful than knowing where they are going.’ Capturing skating on film is less about physical movement than it is about tone and storytelling.

On Ice Perspectives’ recent video of Alex Johnson, skating to ‘Cologne’, choreographed by Chris Jarosz, is a testament to this brand of camera work that cuts right to the heart of skating.

This past February, I volunteered as a door monitor at the Four Continents Championships in Colorado Springs, but I also watched a few events as a spectator. Outside of a couple shows, it was the first major figure skating event I’d been to in more than a decade. And what struck me was the dynamic between ice and audience: there was an invisible yet palpable exchange, especially with skaters like Keegan Messing. I came to appreciate a number of skaters in a new way.

And so now I want to see more live skating. Wouldn’t it be nice to experience a moment of skating, in the actual place at the actual time? To be part of the roar of an applause, to witness a performance that stretches into the audience, to see a quad jump up close, if that’s your thing? If you’re in the US, check out some of the National Qualifying Series events this summer and fall, hopefully in a city near you. You’ll see some decent skating. And if you go, please tell me about your experience!

1.  You can hear (and see) Sarah Hughes’ memorable scream at 8’37” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHfM9iptYig.

2.  This is surely because of copyright issues with skaters’ music.