Female gymnasts have to dance. What if the sport actually valued it?
Women’s artistic gymnastics may be one of the few Olympic events to feature music and choreography, but it doesn’t mean the sport takes them truly seriously. In 2016, in the middle of the Rio Games, the specialist publication Dance Magazine declared that today’s floor routines “insult dance.”
Gymnastics, this line of thinking goes, has distanced itself from its artistic roots by emphasizing acrobatic difficulty, with choreography now just generic filler between the real fireworks.
As a dance critic and gymnastics aficionado, I hoped to feel differently last week as I headed to Bercy Arena, the Olympic stage for the sport in Paris. After all, gymnastics officials have made attempts since 2016 to reprioritize artistry in the sport’s official rule book, with “poor expressive engagement” and “insufficient complexity or creativity of movements” among the deductions judges can now take on floor.
To an extent, it has helped: Some gymnasts, and national teams, are taking advantage and putting clear thought into the overall impact of their floor exercises. Yet at Bercy Arena, dance still felt like an afterthought – and the overall competition format is preventing further progress.
While TV viewers are typically shown one routine at a time, live gymnastics competitions are chaotic. Different athletes go on several apparatuses at once; in a women’s team final like the one the US won last Tuesday, the live spectator’s eye must constantly dart between key competitors. Eager to watch the effervescent Brazilian team on floor? Good luck following a full routine when Simone Biles or Chinese star Qiu Qiyuan are on beam.
It doesn’t make for great sports viewing in general – whatever you do, you’re guaranteed to miss important moments – but for choreography, it’s a death knell. Because the dance elements make up only a small portion of the scores, your attention is often diverted as soon as a tumbling pass is over. The audience’s cheers and gasps regularly drown out portions of the music. (Around me in the cheaper Bercy seats, there was a lot of scrolling and texting in between the acrobatics, too.)
It would help immensely if organizers simply staggered routines in a deliberate manner. NCAA gymnastics started doing that this past season in the US, with no more than two events going on at the same time. At the Olympics, only the floor final, on Monday, will afford gymnasts the opportunity to have the audience’s attention fully on their routines.
Perhaps gymnastics choreography is better understood as designed for TV. Camera close-ups help pinpoint what the gymnasts and their choreographers were going for: Even for the most experienced performers, projecting to 15,000 people seated in the round is a tall order.
Yet the filmed experience is hit-and-miss, too: Some dance highlights never make it to the TV broadcast, which only shows a small portion of routines in team and all-around finals. Choreographers and scores go uncredited. And editing isn’t necessarily attuned to a specific performance: When I went back to rewatch Biles flip and twist her way to the women’s team title, I found that portions of her choreography – by Grégory Milan, a French former ballet dancer – were shot so that Biles had her back to the camera, losing her facial expressions.
Against the odds, some gymnasts still put on highly personal displays.
Italian gymnast Manila Esposito, for instance, is a choreographer’s dream, with her seamless amplitude and toe point. Jordan Chiles, an experienced American gymnast who has put on a show at the NCAA level in recent years, attacks her Beyoncé-inspired routine with assertive, musical phrasing.
Both will appear in the floor final Monday, as will Brazilian star Rebeca Andrade, a confident dancer whose routines pay tribute to her favela roots. Brazil, the team bronze medalists, clearly value dance as high-energy entertainment, and have won hearts in Paris for their performances. Flavia Saraiva’s tribute to the cancan may not be subtle here – a lot of athletes went for French music for the Games, with varying results – but her bright, spirited way of articulating steps had Bercy Arena clapping along every time she appeared on the floor.
There is a continuous flow of movement to the Brazilians’ routines, and a sense of personal style, that many gymnasts lack. Over and again, as other competitors approached the corners of the floor to prepare for a tumbling pass, they abruptly shifted gears, tensing up and leaving movement quality behind.
The Code of Points, gymnastics’ rule book, mandates deductions for such problems, though they are small (up to 0.30 point for “poor expressive engagement according to the style of the music,” for instance). These can add up, but the audience never knows how artistry was evaluated. Only the overall execution score, out of 10, is announced, and combined with the routine’s difficulty score.
There is a template in the sport for putting greater emphasis on performance quality: US collegiate gymnastics has capitalized in recent years on vibrant choreography set to popular hits to grow the sport’s audience. Yet even for NCAA gymnasts such as Chiles who also compete at the Olympics, the issue is that elite routines require much harder elements, and often more tumbling passes. The duration of floor routines doesn’t change accordingly: One minute and 30 seconds is still all they have to dance on the ground and flip in the air.
If gymnastics really values artistry and wants the audience to focus on it, options exist, from limiting tumbling passes to allowing longer routines, or awarding virtuosity bonuses to the best performers. That would involve thinking of each floor routine as a miniature choreographic work: an organic whole that deserves to be enjoyed fully by every audience, live or on TV.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
