It’s Olympic season and ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and her husband, Romain Le Gac, refuse to sit still.
It’s not what ice dancers do, after all.
For one thing, they have some corners to turn, some catching up to do, some eyeballs to impress. After finishing second at the Canadian championships a couple of years ago, they finished only fourth last year, and didn’t make it to the world championships in Boston. A year before the Olympics, that hurt.
So first of all this season, they changed training venues, something that seems to have supercharged them. And they’ve already been winning medals: silver at the Lake Placid Dance International a few weeks ago after winning the free dance.
And then gold on September 7 at the third of 11 Challenger events of the season, the Kinoshita Group Cup in Japan.
In Lake Placid, they finished with 187.08 points. In Japan, they won with 197.90, defeating a good US. team, Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik by 4.39 points.
The Kinoshita Cup was to have been a dance-off with two other Canadian teams to win a spot at the Skate Canada International in Saskatoon in October. But it didn’t seem like a contest. Their competitors, Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer, two-time Canadian bronze medalists, finished fifth in Japan with 169.30 points – 28.52 points behind Lauriault and Le Gac.
And youngsters Lily Hensen and Nathan Lickers were seventh of eight at 154.03, almost 44 points behind the winners.
Obviously Lauriault, 28 and Le Gac, 30, have been busy toiling all summer.
They changed training sites from the IAM centre in Montreal to the satellite IAM club in London, Ont., to work with two-time Olympic champion Scott Moir and Olympic bronze medalist Madison Hubbell and Adrian Diaz.
They still go back to Montreal when they need to. They’ve been in London, Ont., for two months.
They went to London in the beginning to have Hubbell and Diaz choreograph their free dance during the spring and then followed that up with a check-up.
And then they realized they loved being at the site in London. “We wanted it to be more than just two weeks,” Le Gac said.
It was a huge decision. Lauriault, born in Quebec, had always trained in Montreal, since she was eight years old. She’s been training there with Le Gac for 12 years. He moved from France in 2014, joined ice dance forces with her and then married her in 2015.
At first, they skated for France, for whom they finished second four times nationally behind Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, until just after the lockdowns in Covid, when they decided to skate for Canada. They did three world championships for France, for whom their best finish was 13th.
Their hearts beat just a little faster when they finished third- their best placing at a Grand Prix – at the 2022 Skate America – for Canada. They had been fourth at Skate Canada International for France in 2018.
“We felt like it was the right decision because it was like home,” Lauriault said of the move to London. After all, they were teammates in Montreal with Moir, Hubbell and Diaz and trained with them. And it was just one more step to have them behind the boards, coaching them.
When they told the coaches in Montreal – Marie-France Dubreuil, Patrice Lauzon and Romain Haganauer – of their decision to move, the Quebec coaches gave them their blessing. They told Lauriault and Le Gac that they just wanted them to be happy, and to be able to perform at full potential.
“It was nice to have that reaction from their side, too,” Lauriault said.
What’s it like living in London, compared to Montreal? They are leaving behind vehicle traffic jams.
“The only traffic we get is the [Canadian] geese,” Lauriault said. They cross the street one by one.
It is “amazing” for daily training life, Le Gac said. They live in a house with other skaters, and are only 10 minutes from either of the two rinks in which they work.
Working at the skating sites in London is not completely different from Montreal, but Moir and friends bring their own touch to things. “They really put the focus on movement, fluidity, dance,” Lauriault said.
“And it shows in their skaters. The first time we went and we were looking at other skaters and we thought: ‘Oh my god, it’s amazing what they are doing,’”
They were improvising choreography. “Oh my god, if we do improv, it doesn’t look like this,” she said. “So it was really amazing to see people evolve around this with this other point of view. And what they think to skating, it’s really different and new for us.”
While it is very, very difficult not to have fun with Moir as a coach, he also pushes them to the max and “gets the best out of you,” Lauriault said. “It’s nice to have this golden retriever energy by the board.”
And when dance choreographer Sam Chouinard stops by, too, there is a LOT of energy at the rink.
Hubbell and Diaz bring a balance. “It’s really calm,” Lauriault said. “You can always rely on her to tell the truth, tell how she feels.”
Diaz has passion.
And there is a huge team around them, too. There is also a large team surrounding the coaches in Montreal. And the London team makes it fun to train there, Lauriault said. “So it’s nice to get to know people who are so passionate about skating,” she said. “So passionate about dance movement. It’s nice to have that access to a new relationship like this. We’ve been a long time in the sport, so it’s nice to see this new side of the sport.”
The move and the change has helped Lauriault and Le Gac grow, she said. “We grow and we learn through them and they learn through us. It is a different process. It feels really natural and organic.”
They even created the free dance with Hubbell and Diaz differently than they constructed their popular “Pink Panther,” and “The Corpse Bride” routines. With these, they created choreography around a story. This season, with their new free dance, the choreography to the music came first, the story afterwards. (Moir sprinkled his spice all over it, Le Gac said.)
Their free dance is Egyptian music: “Asterix et Obelix,” the Cleopatra story. By no means are they the first to do a Cleopatra-themed routine. They were inspired by others. But they did a lot of their own research to examine what Cleopatra was like as a person and found that Cleopatra publicly portrayed herself as the goddess Isis, just to cement her hold on power in Egypt. And elsewhere. There is an ancient piece of art that shows her wearing blue and gold with large white wings. This inspired their costumes for the free dance. They tried to bring the history into the program.
Their lifts, as always, in the free dance are acrobatic and innovative. The lifts are their strength. In their second element Lauriault twists up into his arms, her back to her partner – with her body straight out like a sarcophagus – and he takes her into a rotational spin. This morphs delightfully into a stationary spin as she rides his shoulders, then is lifted to mid body, then he bends his knees, takes her down further and then back up again. High pluses for this one and GOE of 3.84. It’s their big money-making move. It earned 14.74 points in one go.
At first, they had wanted a mummy program, but “it just didn’t feel right with the choreography we did with Addie and Adian,” Lauriault said. “It was so amazing. It felt so natural and unique. We really wanted to tell the story from the choreography.”
It’s still only a start. They “did our own thing” and they’ve been adding clever bits here and there. It will continue to grow over the season. “It’s really exciting to see that it is only August [September] and the programs are already at a place where we feel proud of it,” she said.
They are skating to Prince for the rhythm dance – but not the “Purple Rain” routine that was so iconic for Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. Finding nineties music was a task, because “it didn’t feel like it was us,” Lauriault said. But when they first heard Prince’s “Thunder,” – and the first sound of thunder – they fell in love. “We thought: ‘Oh my god, we really have to skate to that music,” Lauriault said.
They did the choreography with Hagenauer in Montreal.
But it comes with a catch, something many skaters are finding this year – getting copyright permission to use it, especially during an Olympics. Back in 2014, the International Skating Union allowed vocal music rather than classical that had been in the public domain and didn’t need permissions. Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier got a shock after the 2022 Olympics when they were served with a copyright infringement for their use of a 2015 cover of “House of the Rising Sun.”
And picture this: the ISU has stipulated nineties music for an Olympic season rhythm dance, which will deliver difficulties for many skaters, who can’t opt for classical. More work and more headaches for an Olympic season.
Two weeks before Lake Placid, Lauriault and Le Gac discovered that their choices of “Thunder/Cream “ – two lesser-known Prince tunes – would not work for the Prince establishment, not keen on having it used at the Olympics. It isn’t an absolute refusal, but Moir is trying to smooth some waters to make it happen. It’s a longshot.
So Lauriault and Le Gac have resigned themselves to having to find new music and a new rhythm dance part way through the season.
“It’s kind of sad because we put a lot of energy and we tried to respect the artist as much as we can,” Lauriault said. “It takes a long time to honour a work like this, so we’ll be kind of sad to let it go, but at the same time, I think we need to take it as a refresher.”
If their season is as long as they hope, it might give them a boost to do new work, she said. So for now, they will try to bring a mature attitude to things, and jettison in some more femininity to the choreography because “Prince is a good mix of femininity and masculinity.
“We’ll see how the year evolves.”
So far, they seem ahead of the game. In the rhythm dance, they earned a good early season level three of difficulty for the pattern step. Kudos.
In Japan, Lauriault and Le Gac ruled this element. Half of the eight teams achieved only a basic level of difficulty – not even level 1 – for this element. Maybe as the season wears on, the teams will twisty-turny themselves into higher levels.
And I’d just like to forget nineties music.
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