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Recipient of the 2023 International Skiing History Association's Ullr Book Award.
The story of ballet skiing is one of unrealized adulthood: a child of clashing influences became a mentor-deprived adolescent, ultimately orphaned and abandoned while searching for self. This wandering youngster answered to a mélange of shifting monikers - Trick, Exotic, Hotdog, Freestyle, Stunt, Ballet, Acro - with Skiing for a surname and blessings by officialdom as inspiration. Winterdanse contemplates the foreshortened life of snow skiing's most creative discipline from the perspective of an athlete who presented it as art, and who understood what was required to sustain it. Or foster its return.
Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, letters, journal entries, competition documents, performance programs, and news-article excerpts spanning 50 years, Winterdanse is not just about skiing, but about innovation, discovery, and the influence of contemporary culture on sport and art. It is about finding oneself on a road, a good road but not the right road, only to discern that the right road does not yet exist. It is about building a new road with little more than the conviction that it can be built. It is about thinking independently and owning the consequences.
About the author
Michael Russell was inspired by an exuberant mentor in high school to pursue writing and teaching as a dual career, but uninspiring university classes were interrupted by a higher calling. His passion for creative mind-body integration led in his youth to professional freestyle skiing, where he won three world cups in the ballet event, and then to merging sport and art in the founding of SnowDance, a first-of-its-kind theatrical dance company on skis. With a life-long dedication to achieving excellence in every quest he has been a business manager, photographer, U.S. Freestyle Ski Team captain, logger, musician, stage actor, bartender, teacher, mechanic, motorcoach operator, inventor, builder, and, throughout, an unwavering advocate for individual rights.He wrote the young-adult novel Honor Student in 1989 and a second edition thirty years later, Once Upon a Time on a Bicycle in 2018, Winterdanse: The Misplaced Art of Snow Ballet in 2022 (recipient of the International Skiing History Association's Ullr Book Award), and The Unfounding of America in 2024. He resides off-grid in a secluded mountain range with his wife, German shepherds, and wild-animal neighbors. He is not on social media.
