Winterdanse

Michael Russell's Winterdanse is a passionate cri du coeur about the author's career in freestyle skiing - his triumphs, his failures, and his struggles to have the purity of the art form acknowledged and accepted.

Russell takes us through his dozen years in the sport, pushing the balletic envelope, struggling against the rigidity of many judges and an increasing move in the sport towards "confining" the art form and the establishment of fixed and defined moves - all to make it more digestible and categorizable for the judging panels. Amply and handsomely illustrated with classic photographs and documented with newspaper clippings, copies of score sheets and hand-drawn choreographic layouts, this is one of the first, if not the first, comprehensively reported works on the development of the freestyle movement, its growing pains, its eventual acceptance as an Olympic event and, ultimately, its original form falling from grace in the world of skiing competition.

Winterdanse is an important contribution to the history of skiing and its possibilities.

- Bob Soden, Director, International Skiing History Association

Mike was into serious ballet. He had an obsessive desire to recreate the art for performance on snow. His book, Winterdanse: The Misplaced Art of Snow Ballet, though not for everyone and sure to upset some, is an impressive and important work.

??????- Doug Pfeiffer, former Editor-in-Chief of Skiing, PSIA Co-Founder, 1987 U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame Inductee, widely esteemed "father of freestyle skiing"