Dreaming in Pairs

One night in august 2023, I had a pairs-skating dream about me and Anna, one of those nightmares that’s super-upsetting while you’re having it but kind of funny later. It was about running into trouble on our throw salchow. In real life at the time, we’d been skating together for about four years minus some unavoidable pauses—the pandemic, full-time/overdemanding jobs, scheduling conflicts, coaching gaps—and had a mixed bag of accomplishments. We were making steady development on partnered unison, skating skills, and communication, both spoken and unspoken. “Two more,” for example, might mean, “let’s use our crossover after the next one to begin the exit to our stroking pattern by doing a deep edge change on our right foot.”

We weren’t, however, as far along as we’d hoped on some of the tricks that characterize pair skating, like throw jumps and lifts. Besides dealing with training interruptions, we have an extra challenge that few pairs face: opposite rotational habits. Figure skaters generally jump and spin in the direction that feels most natural upon early experimentation. Skating on our own, I go counterclockwise and Anna goes clockwise. In physically connected pairs tricks, we determine direction by whose rotational task is harder, leaving the other with some extra work to adapt to the situation. We do throws counterclockwise because I rotate in the air while Anna stays on the ground, doing their own formidable task of turning while lofting me in their less-comfortable direction. We do lifts clockwise because Anna lifts me and turns us, while I use core strength to go along for the ride, coming down on my left leg versus the right leg I had trained to land on.

By this point, we’d had a half-revolution throw-waltz jump for a while (“to have” being the skating verb for “can do consistently”), which came with its own thrill and sense of accomplishment. But it doesn’t count for points. The throw salchow, where I begin backwards on my left foot and, with Anna’s lofting assist, jump up and around to land backwards on my right, is the first jump we tried that does count. After several years at it, we were finally making serious progress.

In the dream, we were executing our set-up for the salchow, back crossovers with Anna in the lead, when I suddenly realized that EEK! we were heading straight for a round table with chairs piled messily around it. How could that be? Where did they come from? The furniture was multiplying and suddenly we were skating in a room like a banquet hall, on a wood floor hardly conducive to gliding. Looking back at the dream, I think the setting owed something to those pictures that had recently gone viral of the rooms at Mar-A-Lago where Trump stashed classified documents, like the chandeliered bathroom with boxes not quite hidden behind a shower curtain and the room where they were piled on a ballroom-type stage. But it’s also typical of my skating nightmares that the ice gives way to another surface, like grass or department-store carpet, and no one else recognizes this as a barrier to my performance.

I tried to redirect us, first subtly with a tug and then more frantically. Why did Anna seem oblivious to the danger? At that point in our set-up, they might well have seen the furniture before I did. One of many reasons that a pair team needs trust and communication is that one person is often better positioned to observe unanticipated obstacles. These include dangerous ice imperfections, like a hole where someone slammed their toe pick into the ice launching a jump, and bits of debris like a stray sequin or random trash. Those unexpected little glide-stoppers can be the worst. Coming down from a jump onto a tiny piece of candy wrapper once sent me careening into the boards.

Most frequently, however, the obstacles are other skaters. Skating on practice ice is kind of like a half-choreographed, half-improv event that baffles most casual onlookers. Skaters maneuver around each other, often going quite fast, based on

• anticipating predictable patterns of movement, with dance steps, typical jump entries, or a skater’s oft-repeated program at the front or back of our consciousness.
• watching for unpredictable moves, or a skater simply stopping mid-ice.
• following explicit or tacit right-of-way rules that not everyone may know about, agree on, or follow.

All of that while trying to accomplish what we’re on the ice to do. Pair skaters both take up a lot of space together and have at least slightly different vantage points at every moment.

I was less distressed in the dream that Anna hadn’t seen the furniture than that they didn’t understand my guidance to shift directions. I could have perceived that, less dramatically, as a temporary glitch in good communication or a bad call on my part about what the situation required, like, pretty obviously, forcefully jerking us in a different direction and yelling STOP, THERE’S FURNITURE!! Instead, it felt scary and wounding, as it often can feel when someone close to you fails to act on what you understand to be shared knowledge developed over time. Wait, you know that I can’t eat dairy/hate that person you invited to join us/like it that other way. Where had our pairs magic gone? Did we ever even have it?

In the dream, I felt betrayed, distraught, and bereft. But when I remember the dream, I can only smile. The pair skater in me loves the way it registers what I panicked about losing: the sheer pleasure of intimate connection, the “synergy” that former pairs skater and renowned choreographer Sandra Bezic identifies as key to the “magic” of pairs skating (Kellar 2024a 45:55–46:15). The skating geek/activist in me sits with the conditions of that pleasure, which I hinted at in my description of the dream’s IRL context. Privilege, resources, training, experts, advocates: there is a lot to the bigger project of spreading such pleasures around.