This is the week of the 2025 world figure skating championships. Since the next Winter Olympics are in 2026, this event is going to be particularly intense, because the placements here will determine how many competitors each country gets to send to the Olympics. I won’t be at Worlds, as much as I love Boston – it would have been an expensive trip, but now the anti-Canadian attitudes of the US government are making a lot of Canadians nervous about crossing the border.

Instead of going to Worlds, I went to a different kind of skating event this weekend. It was a performance by Le Patin Libre. Several members of this Montreal-based “contemporary skating company” are former competitive skaters who became frustrated with the limitations and stereotyped expectations within the sport. They were especially frustrated when the physics of skating open up so much possibility for innovative movement and musical interpretation. The company’s co-founder, Alexandre Hamel, has talked about “glide” and how it informs the choregraphy of Le Patin Libre. (I remember my coach telling me once that “dancers are jealous of us, because when we move, we keep going.”) What Le Patin Libre does is both dance and skating, and it challenges the conventions of both forms of performance.

The performance I saw was a work called Murmuration. As the name suggests, it’s built around the idea of flocks of birds swooping and soaring in formation. The choreography has many beautiful explorations of symmetrical movement, but it also portrays the darker side of conformity: the marginalization and abuse of those who are different or who can’t fit in, the repression of creativity, the hierarchies that normalize unquestioning obedience. It was a very powerful piece, especially in the context of what’s going on in the world – like organized attacks on initiatives designed to promote inclusion.

As I sat in the darkened civic ice rink watching this unique performance, I thought of the skaters that will be competing at Worlds this week. They have spent literally thousands of hours practicing in small old rinks like this one. Their parents and families have spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention huge investments of their own time and resources, to get them to this level of competition. And every year fans complain – often justifiably, in my opinion – that the skaters’ programs are increasingly generic, designed to score points rather than to be expressive or imaginative. When these skaters retire from competition, their main job option other than coaching is Disney on Ice or a similar touring show, where they will do the same thing and play the same characters over and over again.

Conformity is a powerful pressure. The work of Le Patin Libre shows how conformity can produce beauty but with the consequence of discouraging other perspectives. I’ll be watching Worlds this week, but when I do I’ll be thinking about Murmuration. Its themes are relevant not only to what skating can be, but also to what kind of society we want to have.