Thomas Gossmann

When people talk about Unicycle Freestyle, most do it with “aww, that’s that girly thing on a unicycle” or “it’s like figure skating on a unicycle”. What if somebody asks a little deeper, like “which are the athletic components of freestyle?”. I bet, we get as much different answers as we get replies to that question. When it comes to developing the sport, a deep understanding of the working subject is indispensable. If not, everthing beeing worked on will fail and it’s just a matter of time until this timebomb will collapse. This article should give an introduction with the inner sights and should help people to understand Unicycle Freestyle.

Discipline vs. Competition

To make Freestyle even less understandable the discipline and the competition are given the same name. Ok, actually the competitions are Individual/Pair/Group Freestyle, but the first part often is omitted when speaking with others, which leads to even more confusion. Time to clear it up.

Freestyle Discipline

Freestyle, amongst all other artistic unicycling disciplines and also gymnastics, dancing, figure skating, etc. are typed as a technical compositorical sport (or composite in english?). Technical (unicycling and non-unicycling), because that’s the most present athletic component, which freestylers rely on and compositorical because all the tiny and atomar technical bits are composed together.

Dictionary.com has a good definition for freestyle: “a performance or routine featuring relatively free, unrestricted movement or intended to demonstrate an individual’s special skills or style, as in figure skating, gymnastics, or surfing.” which applies to Unicycle Freestyle, too. Wikipedia has a list with other sports that have freestyle in their name, which also fall under this definition. I think it’s enough to state the relationship between freestyle and related other sports.

Freestyle Competitions

The german wikipedia gives a little but precise definition for what freestyle is: “Freestyle is a term for free improvisation”. So how do free improvisation (freestyle) and routine go together? Well, they don’t do and they are the opposite to each other. Luckily, there is another definition for both freestyle and routine which is widely adopted in dancing, figure-skating, rythmic sports gymnastics (RSG), etc.. The definition is about the musical representation and applies to Unicycle Freestyle, too:
Routine: “Choreographed movements”
Freestyle: “Improvised movements matching the music” (Pavicic, 2007, p. 87f)
The term freestyle is coined during the breakdance revolution in the early 80′s, when b-boys and b-girls were improvising their moves to music (which was revolutionary that time).

The Components of Freestyle

Almost every compositorical sport consists of 3 major components. In their generalized name, these are: object technic, body technic and choreography. Every sport has its own names for them, so do we (well, kinda). The object of course it the unicycle and we unicyclists show certain technics, which we call tricks. In sports, such as RSG these objects are for example a band, a ball, clubs, in gymnastics these are the gymnastic elements, etc.. For body technic and choreography, this isn’t seen as two separate things in unicycling (for what reason ever) and called presentation. Let’s dive in all three components individually.

1. Tricks

Tricks are the technics in artistic unicycling. There are many structs in which they can be grouped, they show a hierarchy and share a lot of similarities which relates them to each other (Gossmann, 2011). Today, it’s guessed around 1000 different tricks exist in unicycling.

2. Artistics

Artistics (or body technic) refer to everything you are able to do with your body. Movements and their technics from three big fields get soaked in here: dancing, acrobatics and acting.

• For dancing there are known plenty technics which can be used, from an isolation-driven jazz dance and its technics (e.g. popping and locking) to modern dance style with its technics (e.g. contract & release and fall & recovery).
• Acting then is more facing the mimics and gestics during your play. Feelings can be expressed in both forms (dancing and acting), however I would consider dancing the more abstract one.
• Acrobatics is a great field and is the home of highly coordinational and conditional movements. From a general perspective, unicycling tricks would run under the term acrobatics but since we are in the unicycling land, this is our special field and thus got separated. Anyway, everything non-unicycling acrobatics is meant here.

I would like to use this opportunity to talk about ballet. It is in the rulebook, since I can remember reading it (along with jazz dance and modern dance) and I hardly believe anybody knows why and only combines stereotypes from ballet with Unicycle Freestyle. Ballet is the base for almost every sport (yes, NHL teams have 2x ballet training per week) and especially for dance-oriented this is were elegancy is trained (even Arnold Schwarzenegger did ballet to improve his performance elegancy as a body builder). Despite from sports actors often have some additional education in dancing/ballet to support their acting.

From now on, I will use the word artistics, as described here.

3. Choreography

Wikipedia delivers a very good definition: “Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself. The word choreography literally means “dance-writing” from the Greek words “χορεία” (circular dance, see choreia) and “γραφή” (writing). A choreographer is one who creates choreographies by practicing the art of choreography”.
Under choreography the two components from above are unified together. Tricks and artistics play well into each other hands interpreted to music. Along with the mentioned music, there are more constraints in unicycling for a choreography, which can be the theme and the costume to form one unit.

Choreography though must be treated in a special fashion. Whereas tricks and artistics are two components that entirely relate to skills of a rider, this does not apply to choreography. Your coach may create the choreography, which the rider is passing through 1:1 to the audience. Your mum may tailor your costume, your dad may craft the props decorations and a good friend of you, who is a soundartists, may cut the music for you. At the end in your routine you present something which is a team product. Thus, the former two components (tricks and artistics) relate to the athletism (rider skills) where choroegraphy is more like organizing things (3rd person skills).

A Component Infographics

I made a graphics to illustrate where everything is belonging to. This figure does not aim to be complete:

The Components Pyramid

All these components, stack up to a pyramid (see graphic below). The lowest layer is the tricks, followed by the artistics as the middle layer and the final top layer is the choreography. The layers are dependend on each other. The first one, is of course the tricks, without them we wouldn’t be in the land of unicycling, so they are the fundament for the pyramid. The second one, the artistics bring of course the artistic expression into unicycling, they build upon the tricks (without it would be called dancing). The choreography as mentioned above forms both into one unit.

Freestyle Competition Landscape

Now, that the components for Freestyle are identified, we can build competitions from it. Depending on how much layers from the pyramid are used, many different competitions can come out from one layer. They are build out of the same components, but the mode of the competitions makes the difference. I made a little infographics to illustrate this.

So, I listed some possible competitions. I would like to hear yours and I would like to go into the details for each of mine.

UniDancing

UniDancing combines all three components. In the best there is an equal weight in the usage of tricks and artistics. Which might be some extraneous dance moves, some cool acrobatics, very nice acting or another way of showing impressive artistics. The choreography combines all that on top of tricks.
UniDancing can be done individually, in pairs or groups.

Freestyle

This is where the definition from freestyle comes back in, a “free improvisation”. Setup can be similar to UniDancing, give the rider its natural environment, give him a music and he must interpret the music with tricks and artistics to, of course the rider doesn’t know the music before his start.

Freestyle Battles

This is an addition to Freestyle above, mainly influenced by breakdancing. Riders can start individually or in teams. Battleing against each other by interpreting music with tricks and artistic and having a fiercy non-verbal communication between the two rivaling parties through body language.

Open-X / “xtreme” Freestyle

This is just about tricks. Nothing else. Some music but neither representation nor interpretation is beeing judged, just supplementary for the competition. Two minutes just kickin’ tricks.

Flatland

Flatland, for the sake of completeness, is the about bare tricks, too. The winner is crowned after an eliminating tournament through battles with a possible preliminary round.

Today’s Freestyle – Some criticism

Today’s Freestyle isn’t build with that deep understanding of the sport and neither of its components. Thus a lot of things got mixed up, which resulted in using existing terminology wrongly. Another thing is talking about a term (e.g. Freestyle) out of two different point of views, that should be handled separately. The required differentiation is lost and the phenomenons are still present today. I’d like to state some of these false statements:

• The proper name for the Freestyle Competition IS UniDancing.
• Basically everything in presentation judging is mixed together in many, many wrong ways.
  • The definition for choreography in the rulebook looks like it’s taken from wikipedia and then changed to something wrong (plagiarism + betrayal).
  • The proper word for synchronization is musical interpretation and synchronization a analog or congruent interpretation are just two of the four possible forms that exist (Others are contrasting and autonom) and they even may be mixed in one single routine (Dieter-Rotenberger, 2008, p. 7).
  • Choreography vs. Artistics
    • Artistics is judged in many different categories. In 3.23.2 Choreography and Style, 3.23.3 Showmanship and Originality and 3.23.4 Interpretation: Costumes, Music and Props, where actually style gets repeated unnecessarily and judged twice (unnecessary redundance).
    • Choreography is judged in many different categories. Almost everything in 3.23.4 Interpretation: Costumes, Music and Props, 3.23.2 Choreography and Style and in 2.23.3 Showmanship and Originality.
    • Originality and Total Impression in 3.23.3 are hybrids, they favor either artistics and/or choregraphy depending on the routine.
    • Choreography vs. Artistics in numbers:
      

      Section	Choreography	Artistics
      3.23.2	7.5 (Composition + Choreography)	2.5 (Style)
      3.23.3	3.75 (half Originality + half Total Impression)	11.25 (half Originality + half Total Impression + Expresiveness + Showmanship)
      3.23.4	7.5 (Costume, Music, Props)	2.5 (Style)
      Sum	18.75	16.25
      Presentation %	37.5%	32.5%
      Total %	18.75%	16.25%

      Interpretation of the values above:

      • The table shows the score that is targetting choreography resp. artistics.
      • Hybrids are counted halfways on each side.
      • The percentage values mean, how much is the presentation/total score affected by that specific component.
      • I’m yet unsure about the musical interpretation.
  • Artistics should have the same weight as tricks, they haven’t 50% vs. 16.25%.
  • Rider skills are judged lower than 3rd person skills (choreography vs. artistics)? Oh god.
  • Why the hell are dismounts (a totally technical aspect) scored in presentation? No rider ever gets this.
• The interpretation sections for each side (technical and presentation) can only be seen as a rescue scream, because of an insufficient understanding of freestyle. The creators of the judging system might have thought they give an additional to judges to fill in some judgements they couldn’t fill in elsewhere, because they didn’t understand the sport very well enough. We ran a survey in germany about Freestyle judging. At the end there was a free field for participants to enter their meaning. Guess what? Most people complained they have no idea what to do with the interpretation category.
• The 50% of the technical aspect are therefore section 3.22.1 – 3 and 3.23.1.

This is just a rough overview of what has gone wrong over the past years, unfortunately this has a very crucial impact on the riders.

1) We wrongly educate riders. Once they read in the rulebook, find a definition for something they most likely believe in what they read. We must stop teaching this mistakes and better educate riders, coaches and judges. As a better understanding will also better lead them to what they need to focus when practicing.

2) The judging scores are a feedback to the riders (or at least should be). Once they see their scores and see, ok I my total score got 70% from technical and 30% from presentation, they may come to the conclusion they should practice more presentation. Digging in a level deeper, you can observe if your technical deficiencies are stemmed from their quality, their difficulty or something else. Same should be possible for presentation. What’s the feedback for the rider at the moment? A skirmish of randomly arranged numbers with no relation to the distinct aspects the rider has worked for so hard.

Further Freestyle Development

For the development of Freestyle, there is very, very… very much to clean up. I propose the following:

Short-term goals: Provide slots to plug in new Freestyle competitions and EDUCATE people. The IUF plans to start its education plattform in summer 2013 and two courses by me (that I hold at Unicon 16) are waiting to see the light of the world.

Mid-term goals: Reform the Freestyle competition landscape. Create more knowledge about unicylce freestyle*.

Long-term goals: Create reliable rules for each competition, that live longer than two years (The work on the new Freestyle UniDancing rules will start in fall 2013, I will lead this committee).

* If you thought, now that I layed off all that insights, you are wrong. This is just the start, this is only an introduction, the preamble. This is really hard work and I happily repeat myself in describing it with the following words: We want unicyclists to give more than their best at competitions they can expect the same from us.

Thanks for reading.
- gossi

References

• Dieter-Rotenberger, C. (2008). Skript Tanz Grundkurs. Unpublished Script. Darmstadt: TU-Darmstadt.
• Gossmann, T. (2011). Strukturen in Unicycling Skills accessed on 28th of jan, 2013
• Pavicic, C. (2007). Hip Hop Dancing Bodies. Hamburg: Dr. Kovac