For this second program comparison post, it’s time for a (half literal) who wore it better for two French skaters who skated to the song “In This Shirt” by The Irrepressibles.
This season, Romain Ponsart used the song for his short program, while Kevin Aymoz used it for his free program. For reference, here is Romain’s short program from the Internationaux de France, and Kevin’s free program from Skate Canada.
First things first, with the song title being what it is I feel like the costumes need to be mentioned. Below you can see both of their costumes (Kevin on the left, Romain on the right.) Both of them went for something pretty simple -- light top, dark pants -- which I like. I prefer Kevin’s because it’s more flow-y and the ombre is pretty cool, but Romain’s is nice too. They are both wearing good shirts.
(Kevin’s photo from here and Romain’s from here.)
The song itself is a good choice for both of them I think simply because I feel like it’s easy to cut up. Until the end, all the verses pretty much are the same and it’s a slow song, so you can easily cut parts out and it wouldn’t sound weird. The official band video has it at 5 minutes and 30 seconds, though some of the other videos have it as around 4 minutes, which would be the length of the free program. In that case, Kevin wouldn’t have had to do much editing at all.
And in fact, on watching Romain’s short program and paying closer attention to the music, I can’t tell that there are any cuts at all because whatever cuts they made are so smooth. The skate itself is pretty relaxed up until the step sequence, which is where the song picks up towards the end with a violin creating a faster rhythm to skate to. The rest of the song is really slow and mournful, so it makes sense that the step sequence was where it was.
Interestingly, despite the shorter amount of time, Romain lets the beginning instrumentals play out before the lyrics come in even though it would be easy to cut it. That choice does ease you into the program, though.
The first thing I noticed about Kevin’s performance is that right away it’s more dramatic. I mean, this happens in the beginning:
He is also a very smooth, lyrical skater, more so than Romain I think. Everything flows well. Another difference between them is transitions into jumps. It’s kind of hard to see with Romain because the short program only has three jumps, but it’s really noticeable with Kevin, that he has really good transitions into his jumps. As the commentator points out, it flows well with his choreography.
Because there’s more time, this program builds into the climax of the music and action more than Romain’s -- it grows. I think that’s because the song, with its slow pace, lends itself well to being performed to something where more time is allowed.
Like Romain, he has a really good step sequence at the climax of the song, but no spins afterwards -- instead he takes the same pose that he did at the beginning of the program, pictured above. It’s very dramatic, but I feel like it says a lot about his skating, which is very emotional.
I haven’t seen much of both Romain and Kevin, but if I had to say from these two programs, I’d definitely pick Kevin as the one who’s more artistically inclined.
They both used the song well with the time they were given, and it was interesting to see that although they were skating the program in a different section of competition to each other (short vs long) the programs themselves weren’t set up that much differently. Even though Kevin’s had more time to build, they both built up slowly to the climax, which they took full advantage of with excellent step sequences.
I would happily watch both of these programs over again, and it’ll be interesting to see how they do the rest of the season, since they both seem to be doing really well so far.
