Blog

It is widely believed that technical achievement in dance is only possible for children, that there is an uncrossable chasm between adult students and fully trained dancers who began as children. Although this seems empirically obvious, I stand as a counterexample: I began professional ballet training at age 28 and two years later made it…

Running three consecutive weekends, Ice Dance International presented The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason in North Adams, MA today as part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The all-male cast presented “Tennessee Williams live on an ice rink — a wholly original, site-specific performance about making a plan and leaving the world of…

Join us in a wide-ranging lecture on Figure Skating and an amazing mathematical shape that shows up all over the place! When you’re done with the lecture, try your hand playing the YP Figures simulation game: Addendum: Pivoting Figures

Combined Figures, popular in 19th Century England, are figures involving multiple skaters on ice skating together, skating around a central orange marker, to create spatial patterns. Similar to Irish Ceili dancing and other group dance forms from the British Isles, Combined Figures require precision and uniformity between participants. Although combined figures are well documented in…

A figure is a named, choreographed movement or sequence of steps. This comes to us from dance traditions of the British Isles, where dancers would work together to create patterns of position and movement. Compared to ballet training today, a figure is larger than a step and smaller than an enchainment (“combination”) — and it…