One of my favourite online columns is The Cut’s I Think About This A Lot, a column “dedicated to private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.” Finally, I have found kindred spirits who are also willing to disclose the random detritus that stubbornly clings–unwanted, or at least unbidden–to the otherwise hollowed-out recesses of the mind.
If I were a contributor to the august entries of I Think About This A Lot, my first entry would undoubtedly be dedicated to Ilia Averbukh’s choreography for Evgenia Medvedeva. In a world where choreographers are content to have their charges skate to the 391391419th iteration of Bizet’s Carmen or the same hackneyed versions of Romeo and Juliet, Mr. Averbukh–to his credit–tends to select unique choices of music for Ms. Medvedeva and kit them out with grandiose themes: clinical death, the suffering of the deaf, the ephemeral nature of life in the chaotic times of terrorism. The presence of such sweeping program concepts of Deep Seriousness in the rather frothy milieu of figure skating, however, brings to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s knowing remark that only a single letter separates the comic and the cosmic.
But it’s not necessarily the wildly ambitious themes of Ms. Medvedeva’s Averbukhian programs that are seared into my mind–no, it’s the choreography that serves as the chassis for such themes. To be more specific, it’s certain moments of choreography that go so far into the ludicrous, it circles all the way back around to . . . being entertaining? You know what I’m talking about:
Exhibit A: THE phone call, that anguish, those trailing notes . . . need I say more?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRyl9ROnzec
Exhibit B: Laughter, reading a giant book, hopscotch and skipping rope: a hilariously hamfisted paean to prelapsarian idylls of childhood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1-mp7eqUo0
Exhibit C: The ending of Ms. Medvedeva’s short-lived The Leftovers LP. I don’t even know what’s going on here at the ending, all I know is that I’m obsessed with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKkRUWGCq_U
Is it quality choreography? No. But it is unmissable, unmistakable, and unforgettable. In ten years I’ll probably have only a dim recollection of what the vast majority of Ms. Medvedeva’s competitors were skating to, but I doubt I’d ever forget Ms. Medvedeva picking up that goddamn phone with such anguish at the end of her Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close LP. And such is the particular, annoying genius of Mr. Averbukh’s choreography for Ms. Medvedeva: it’s so on the nose, so ludicrous, so devoid of any working relationship with subtlety, that you don’t love it because it’s good, you start loving it because it’s awesome.
Does that make any sense? No? Well, neither does Mr. Averbukh’s choreography. But that, of course, is entirely beside the point when it comes to the things play forever on loop in our minds.
[this post is perhaps a long, roundabout way of me articulating one of my issues with Ms. Medvedeva’s programs this season: they–particularly that tango LP–are so bland!]