By Dorothy Snell Curtis
The water of Lake Owasso must have been well-regarded because in the ice house opposite my grandmother's cottage huge slabs of ice that had been cut in winter were stored in sawdust and, in summer, sawed again, loaded on trucks and sold door-to-door for the ice boxes of those residents of St. Paul, who lacked refrigeration.
Mostly the lake froze white or pale blue but when it was best for skating it was at its most beautiful, a dark sapphire. We rode out through windswept patches, lured onward by the murmuring resonance beneath, until discretion suggested retreat to circling parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends near the warming fire on the shore.
Our skating parties were orchestrated by my mother's brother who, uncled while still a boy, was our playmate and friend. John, with his wife Ella, skates still on racers, two or three times a week, continuing a lifelong association with the sport during which, as J. E. Strauss, he made blades for many of the world's most famous figure skaters, from Sonja Henie to Frick and Frack.
My first recollection of skating is reserved, however, not for Lake Owasso but for the flooded playground near where we lived in St. Paul. Here I took my first strokes on that year's Christmas present, a pair of hockey rockers mounted on black boots. The heavy blades, shaped to a radius of six to seven feet, were held with brackets attached to the sole plates. Principally used for hockey, they were an excellent choice for a beginner because their quarter-inch width made them stable. In those first moments, exhilaration in free motion held me spellbound. The joy never got old. It would seize me over and over, every time I set foot on the ice.
My parents, father a sometime pond skater who could dance a passable waltz or fourteen-step, albeit over a side-saddle hip that he never corrected and my mother, an enthusiastic long blader, decided that I should be encouraged. Their decision was to have enduring and constructive consequences for on the next winter, figure skating became the focus of my life coincidental with the greatest advances in the sport since Jackson Haines, seventy years before or maybe ever. It was in the Thirties that a rather uncommon pastime grew into a widely admired art that today carries its best practitioners to the top of the entertainment industry.
Serious figure skating required not only staunchly supporting parents, but the advantages of indoor ice and club affiliations as well. The Hippodrome Skating Club met on winter Sundays in a fine old building that had been designed to accommodate equestrian events at state fair time, but my weekends began the day before with a morning practice. Early on these Saturdays, I embarked on yawning journeys in an overheated streetcar, across the River and St. Paul to the Fair Grounds wedged between the cities, to skate with my friend, Shirley Bowman and to have a lesson from Roy Shipstad who, in not many years, would be billed in the Ice Follies as the 'Human Top,' famous nationwide for his spread eagles and spins.
The great expanse of new ice in the Hippodrome, said by locals to be the largest in the world under a roof, was as irresistible to children as newly fallen snow. We played our first game of the day on that shining, slick sheet as, dropping to our backsides after a good sprint, we tried for the longest, fastest slide. After our lessons and as more skaters arrived, we formed a samba line behind the lead skater, who had to be strong; or we staged foot races or played tag; or at top speed squatted on one skate to 'shoot the duck' or, best of all, played crack-the-whip.
Such play was not without value. We learned to sprint, take off from any angle, turn on a dime, stop short going forward or backward, reverse and slip away from a tag, recover without falling from a misstep and judge to the millimeter where our skates were; we became as sure footed as goats on that treacherous surface, even at whip's end where we experienced speeds greater than we could reach on our own. And so, on those Saturdays we played and afterward ate our lunch sitting on a bench in the warming room while the ice was swept with broad brooms and then flooded.
Though under cover and protected from wind or snow, indoor rinks in the Twin Cities lacked equipment until the mid-thirties to freeze water artificially. The cold in these places was outrageous. Heavily wrapped against it, one was too constricted to move well; lightly wrapped and one was too cold. I remember once dashing out to the center of the rink amongst the circling long bladers and carelessly brushing up against one of them. Unhurt, we both went on skating. Later in the warming room for a routine count of fingers and toes, I discovered I had been cut because as my skin approached normal temperature, a small wound in my leg began to bleed....
While free skating, we could warm up enough to overcome the inhibiting nature of cold muscles, but school figures, executed with far less exertion and pace, were not comfortably practiced for long at low temperatures. On the other hand, skating on natural ice may have offered training advantage in that the skater had to work harder in cold temperatures to overcome the resistance to the blades than was necessary on artificial ice in air temperatures of 350-400 F. where a moistened surface reduced resistance. The long term effect probably fostered strong, long strides and deep hard edges that in turn gave skaters the control to execute school figures at a pace commensurate with clean edges and turns. According to Dick Button, natural ice actually assisted the skater's ride out and away from a jump landing, in a kind of understated trampoline lift. Doubtless it promoted other skills essential to free skating, such as deeply coiled spin preparation and a good and longer run, thrust for thrust.
When the St. Paul Figure Skating Club was formed in 1936 the English practice of patch skating was introduced. The ice was divided into grids and skaters were assigned one or two patches, most commonly to practice school figures. Intervals exclusively for free skating or dancing were also set aside. But before this welcome and orderly arrangement one went to the rink and took one's chances, working on figures or spins in the middle, ringed in by the round-and-rounders or free skating among the straight skaters on the outside track, in itself a sport not without challenges. In 1933 the St. Paul Auditorium was constructed. Its plant was the first in the area to freeze water artificially for skating, making possible extension of the season in the spring and ice in summer!
The rink generated immense energies, creative purpose and resources in the community that in a few years made St. Paul perhaps the foremost skating center in the country, a place that offered opportunities for study, practice, experiment and performing not available elsewhere in any one place.
The ice was superb, very fast, always the same texture. It had a waxy appearance, uniformly smooth, unblemished by the rogue splotches found on natural ice. And we could skate, as the postman made his rounds, in rain, snow, sleet, hail or blazing sun. Music was supplied by someone not then called a disc jockey who played phonograph records in a booth above the balcony from which he would respond cheerfully to our shouted requests. We skated regularly on Sunday mornings and in two or three evening sessions each week. Often on afternoons after school, Robin Lee (U. S. Champion, 1935 through 1939) and his father, who took me as a pupil soon after the Auditorium opened, and I worked in quiet harmony, the sole occupants of that cavernous studio.
My instructors included in addition to Roy Shipstad, A. R. Lee and later Orrin Markhus followed by Bill Swallender, who died in the plane crash in Belgium in 1961 that killed our entire Olympic team and many coaches and officials. Among my informal tutors were three judges of the United States Figure Skating Association who were authorities especially to be respected for essentially they and others like them established technical standards. They often argued the relative merits of American style figure skating versus international style, coming down firmly for the latter.
Joel Liberman, Skating Club of New York and a national judge, described the differences in SKATING, looking back from 1944:
The International was a vigorous free style of execution in which all the body was brought into play while the American style was a ... cramped method of execution-accomplished by ankle and foot contortions rather than by coordination of the body.
The debate was puzzling for it was an American, Jackson Haines (best remembered for his invention of the sit spin that is named for him), whose theories, at first resisted by Americans, came to be known as international style. Haines' technique insisted on two major elements. Of first importance was the union of music with skating, an innovation that found a particularly sympathetic reception in European capitals where he introduced it.
The other of Haines' theories replaced the emphasis on tracings, except for school figures which evolved into a separate art, to an emphasis on the body itself, carriage, style, flow, grace. Irving Brokaw, a prominent New Yorker, and other North American skaters familiar with Haines' work in Europe, enthusiastically embraced the style. The United States Figure Skating Association, organized in 1921, affirmed the technique, classified school figures and probably was the significant force in the abandonment of the intricate geometrics resembling enlarged penmanship exercises so tortuously performed, even in free skating events, continuing into the new century.1
The technique we learned became the universal language of competition, although I vividly remember one competitor whose vestigial free skating - so out of touch, so innocent, a sort of spastic rendering clipped from a silent film - was a matchless comedy of alarm for the spectator whose breath was held hostage to those protuberant, vulnerable knees and elbows that waited to land a hit. The new theories were further refined and extended as figure skating embraced more and more ballet technique, but it was modification of the skate blade itself that has enabled skaters to push to the threshold of the Quad.
A drawing2 of Haines' steel blade shows the toe to be sharply upward curving in front of the sole plate. It looks decorative, as if a surviving element of fancifully wrought iron blades, made like sleigh runners. It is impossible to know from a photograph of Haines wearing these skates if the curving toe was fitted into a groove in the bootsole, a modification that may have come later, preceding placement of the rampant toe into a groove in the tip of the sole plate. The toe picks were cut well up on the rising curve at approximately a 45o angle to the blade. In the Thirties many skaters still wore this design. As late as November 1936 at least, Skating Magazine3 carried an ad for the model and Montgomery Wilson, Canadian Champion and Champion of North America, was photographed in 1937 wearing a pair with a somewhat modified placement of the teeth at a more acute angle to the blade, but not yet on the same radius. The blade toe appears to have been mounted into a groove in the sole plate.
J. E. Strauss of St. Paul began manufacturing closed-toe figure skates, blades of one piece featuring three stanchions between runner and sole plate, in 1914 and was the first in the world to do so. The blades were manufactured continually over two generations, by father and then by son, except during World War II, until 1980. The Strauss design gave the blade stability while the placement of the teeth beneath, rather than in front of, the boot and in the radius of the blade, rather than tangential to it, made it possible to bear weight on the spinning tooth and its backup, shaped like pyramids or wedges (those above were sawteeth) for spins or jumps or running or deceleration, and enabled skaters to advance their art well past the ankle work deplored by Liberman. To reach the toe pick wearing the old design, a skater would have had to lift his heel(s) perhaps seven inches, whereas the Strauss model reduced that reach to about three inches, or well within the zone of greatest foot strength. Many photographs made in the Twenties and Thirties, before the Strauss design was widely used, show figure skaters standing awkwardly on tippy toes, their ankles buckling forward, precariously balanced on those hard-to-reach teeth. For pivots the toe picks were probably well-positioned, but by the Thirties that move was largely passé (except for the death spiral pivot) and scratch spins, which were in, needed a spinning tooth, lower down. Moreover, the new design encouraged a race toward mastery of multiple turn jumps and reachable toe picks were useful for those requiring a vault, as with hand or pole.
Skaters found they were able to jump high enough to turn twice or three times before landing safely on a three-stanchion blade that did not twang like a plucked string on impact.
Of course, materials and design of boots have both been changed since and provide more support than did our relatively soft leather models that might not have borne the landings of a girl thrown by her partner into jumps as high as she is tall and several times longer.
International technique served the ideals of fluidity and apparent effortlessness. Violent, lurching movements characteristic of the old fashion were discarded; sudden tilts were for comedians. Weight must be carried always 'over' the skating foot, the body when erect held in a plane from head through shoulder, hip and ankle, with no breaks such as occur if the skating hip is lifted or 'sat' upon or when a shoulder is dipped.
When the body's weight is carried properly the skater will find the blade's sweet spot for every move but if, for example, he attempts a jump while his body lags behind his skate, he will land in that unfortunate posture! I learned the Jackson Haines spin from Roy and Eddie Shipstad and Oscar Johnson one evening when they observed me struggling with it and interrupted their own workouts to offer some pointers.
They insisted I had to sit well down on my skating foot. It was purely lazy not to get right down, they said; and yes, they agreed I would fall doing it until I learned where to ride the blade. They demonstrated graphically. Well down, hips tucked under the torso, knee bent in an acute angle, free leg stretched forward in imitation of a Cossack dancer (could Haines have borrowed from a dance he saw in Russia?), one had both speed and control. But broaden the angle of the kneebend, let the hips ride high and the skater turned like a slowing top, looping and bobbing in a dying circle.
At the same time that skaters strove for the utmost technically, claims were being made for art. One close observer, possibly a parent of a skater, wrote in 1937, "If I were a champion skater...I should want to be the greatest artist of the ice..." He and many others denounced technique at the expense of art and generally called for less 'acrobatics' and more 'skating' - whatever, one of them said, that may be held to mean.
A competitor who was more than technically superior was a 1940 standout. Taking a pioneer's risk, Eugene Turner of Los Angeles skated a program of superb artistry, deftly choreographed and rich in connecting steps and positions, his unflawed jumps and spins subordinated to the demands of the music and of symmetry. It was the best and the most unusul program I had ever seen in competition, the most balanced and the most exciting. I think its acceptance (Turner won the title) was evidence that officials of the skating association, already sensitized to the possibilities for purposes of exhibition skating, were ready to bring artistic sensitivity into the criteria for judging competitive skating. Just four years later, Oscar L. Richard, grand old man of the Skating Club of New York, announced the gift of a cup to be awarded at the National Championships for the most artistic skating, the winner to be selected by a committee of three - a sculptor, a painter and a musician.
Gillis Grafstrom, inventor of the flying sit spin, Olympic and World Champion in the Twenties, was said to be the father of interpretive skating, the term that skaters first used to describe choreographed figure skating programs. Theresa Weld Blanchard, the American chronicler par excellence of figure skating, remembered him in a 1959 article about the Olympics of 1928. In a carnival held afterward, the Swede skated three programs, each conveying a character entirely different from the others and perfectly realized in his interpretations; Blanchard said she never expected to see his performance equaled. But, of course, she did.
Perhaps the USFSA officials and their colleagues in the International Skating Union were even then discussing an improvement in official language to describe the components of free skating to be judged in competition. Classifications used in the 'Thirties and 'Forties - 'content,' 'performance,' or 'form' have all long since been replaced with more precise expressions - 'technical merit' and 'artistic impression’ making the latter an equal component in the formula.
By the mid-'Thirties, the transformation of figure skating from an esoteric hobby of a few into a performing art admired by thousands or millions, advanced in megasteps as a result of a growing use of modified blades, improved refrigeration technology, universal adoption of better skating technique and the immense force of public interest set in motion by a slip of a dynamite Norwegian girl, Sonja Henie. Statistics went off the page.
In 1936, an instantly popular motion picture starring a figure skater, One in a Million, was produced, following a promotional tour that vaulted Henie into the public eye (and heart) in a matter of months.4 She toured, skating in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis and Minneapolis. Local amateur skaters filled out the cast.
In the same year, Shipstad and Johnson formed the Ice Follies. Using the name of their first amateur productions in St. Paul, their’s was the first troupe of professional skaters to go on tour. In 1937, Maribel Vinson (U.S. Ladies Champion, 1928 through 1937, except 1934) and Karl Schafer of Austria, holder of multiple European, World and Olympic titles, joined forces and took a company to bookings in several cities. By 1941, Ice Capades was on the road and It Happens on Ice was in continual performance at the Centre Theatre in New York City. Various tank shows, some carrying their rinks with them, played hotels and nightclubs. Dorothy Franey, a former speed skating champion whom we watched practice at the Hippodrome, turned to figure skating and took a show on tour in the Midwest where, in Chicago in 1914, figure skaters entertained dinner guests in the Sherman Hotel. Dorothy Lewis, dancer and acrobat, put on a pair of my hand-me-downs in early 1935 and soon thereafter began a career of skating and acrobatic dancing on a tiny ice surface at the Hotel St. Regis in New York. And the redoubtable Evelyn Chandler starred in a show in Washington, D.C. in 1938 at the Shoreham Hotel where I was invited to a practice with her. The "ice," an experimental chemical concoction, had been laid on the floor like a lineoleum. On this surface, as tough as a nylon cutting board, the friction that eases the blade's passage over ice fought the skater for every inch. There was no ride. Not to push was not to move - and there were unscheduled stops. Spirals, spreadeagles and spins, all executed at rest, could not be skated. Chandler managed a few jumps and some Arabian cartwheels. In short, she took to the air.
In the three years before the United States entered WWII the number of new rinks represented a 50 per cent increase over existing facilities. In some cities, more than one rink was constructed. In the Nation's Capital, the Chevy Chase Ice Palace opened in November, 1938, the month that ground was broken for Riverside Stadium at 26th and D, N.W., near the site of the Kennedy Center and by January, 1941, a third arena, built by M.J. Uline adjacent to his ice making company at 3rd and M., N.E., was host to the Ice Capades.
Production of skates in 1937 doubled that of 1935, and 40% of them were figure skates; the number of subscriptions to Skating magazine increased by 1100 in 1938, more than double the increases of the previous two years; in 1941 the number of tests taken nationally reached 2,335 or 63% more than in any previous year. In 1938, the advance order for the Toronto Skating Club's four-day carnival was oversubscribed, necessitating the return of $20,000 in prospective ticket sales. Summer skating, formerly the almost exclusive province of the Olympic-built arena at Lake Placid, was introduced across the country.
Figure skating had simply exploded in the public imagination and ice shows proliferated all around. Professional shows evolved from club carnivals that were themselves probably entertainments originally offered to as many relatives and friends of the skaters as could be scraped together. But the shows grew to be annual events of considerable magnitude and, where they benefited charity, their 'share' of the market was sometimes protected, to the exclusion of competing shows, by the local establishment.
Whether, as Maribel Vinson believed, the 'artistic' carnival was an American innovation, the productions could be huge and costly. There was the staging (in one year, a Toronto club spent $25,000 on lighting effects, a not inconsiderable sum in the 'Thirties); the rink rental (the Skating Club of New York presented its show, usually of four days, in Madison Square Garden); there were costumes, pay for professional skaters, and travel and expenses for imported amateurs; musicians' salaries and support services accounted for large sums. Club carnivals were the only game in town for amateurs and the only forum for experiment.
Of course, numbers were necessarily designed to be within the abilities of the skaters. When ability was limited, a title (perhaps of the accompanying music) and costuming and maybe a set or prop, did more than the skating to convey a theme. But as skaters grew in skill, carnivals began to have a serious artistic dimension even though, as one USFSA official observed, they had not explored music as fruitfully as they might. He counted six different carnivals in a single season that had featured Waltz of the Flowers and plaintively suggested there were other Tchaikovsky compositions and other composers!
The Figure Skating Club of Minneapolis productions were presented in the Minneapolis Arena beginning in 1933. I was often asked to open these shows and as I was very young and no great shakes, those who invited me relied on the indulgence of the audience who could be counted on to applaud enthusiastically if I merely remained upright - or even if I did not.
After skating I was always invited to remain and thus saw many local shows, including two of Sonja Henie's appearances when, swathed in a costume of gleaming white feathers, she performed her Dying Swan.
The Norwegian star liked to be known as the 'Pavlova of the Ice,' perhaps for this program that was doubtless inspired by Michael Fokine's composition for the great dancer to the music of Saint-Saëns. But Henie's rendition was a floor piece danced on ice, rather than a figure skating piece. I remember a great deal of toe work, fluttering, and slow, slow motion. In any case, the choreography seemed dwarfed; the very essence of skating, the swift effortless flow of the skater across space, was absent. And very probably, the subject was a poor choice for the robust spirits of Twin Cities audiences. However, it was perfect for satire.
The late Heinie Brock, who had played hockey for the University of Minnesota, was a speed and figure skater, a jumper of barrels and a talented comic. Brock arranged a parody directed at both Sonja's meticulous technique and her art and called it The Dying Duck.
He opened on the wing, suspended by a cable and was 'shot' by a hunter who fired from the sidelines. Brock fluttered down, 'mortally wounded,' and sketched out Sonja's routine, not omitting to circle and circle, as she was wont to do, to place a spin or jump on a patch of unblemished ice. He even took a brush from his pocket and swept at it. The audience, who had observed Sonja's cautious habit, laughed heartily. Sonja, we learned later, had not been amused, but she needn't have cared. No other skater has slipped into her boots and into the niche she carved and occupied. She was superb at marketing herself and remains the skating star of national memory whom she created from a modest talent.
While known to be an able businesswoman, personally generous and able to swear imaginatively in English, Sonja Henie assumed the role of an ingénue, sweet and cute. As a skater, she was dainty and graceful and her eyes sparkled. But her performance was methodical, almost wooden; she was no jumper, her spins were ordinary and there was no pace or fire. People said she had won her titles for her superior school figures.
In her shows after the '36 tour, when Sonja had assembled a supporting cast, she saw to it that she was beautifully presented. Artful, very Hollywood-style packaging and her undeniable aptitude for connecting well with her audiences, enabled her to hold top billing, despite the greater talents of her contemporaries.
One critic in 1938 compared the Henie show with the Vinson production, both having recently played in Cleveland, where he wrote: "By and large, however, I felt that Miss Henie lacks Maribel Vinson's magnificent vocabulary and precision...(Miss Henie's) program is more beautifully mounted, but I felt her technical equipment less interesting."
The first of the Twin Cities ice shows that reached beyond parochial appeal was presented in the Auditorium a year after it had opened its doors, in two performances on April 14, 1934. The program reads:
The Board of Trustees of the Children's Hospital ... Saint Paul, presents The Ice Follies of 1934, under the direction of Shipstad and Johnson and the Twin City Figure Skating Club.
The flavor of the first editions of Ice Follies and Ice Capades was distinctly music hall and while it was wonderfully fresh and lively entertainment, there was little art. Tried and true themes supported the numbers: Romantic love (Indian Love Call, Harvest Moon,); idyllic childhood (Babes in Toyland, a Parade of Wooden Soldiers); the passion of a Parisian ruffian (Apache Dance); penguins, snowflakes or snowmen, or as rendered by Currier and Ives; folk dances - Scandanavian, Dutch, Scottish, Hungarian or gypsy; and there were clowns and animals. Except for Vinson and Owen's Gay Blades, professional shows were slow to experiment with serious pieces and relied on rhythmic skating, some of it exciting, to light, bright and mostly popular music interjected with comic acts that surpassed any to be seen today. Prominent among then were the inventive, rubber legged and cantilevered Frick and Frack; Douglas Duffy, paired with a life size rag doll; Joe Jackson, Jr., the helpless victim of a collapsing bicycle and Eric Wait, snared in his 14-foot scarf, each as authentic as Chaplin or the brothers Marx.
Evelyn Chandler, a trouper to her fingertips, was an entertainer in the vaudeville tradition with a rapidly growing national following. She was especially admired for her athletic ability and her daring. She was the first woman to execute two revolutions of a jump and the first skater of either sex to perform Arabian cartwheels on ice. She and Henie were wholly dissimilar.
Chandler was strongly built, vigorous and conspicuously muscled, as the Norwegian star was not. Nor was she trained, as Sonja had been, in classical ballet positions - long lines, pointed toes, graceful hands on reaching arms. She tried for pace and acrobatics, was less a skater and more a showman who won her audiences by the force of her personality and hell for leather technique.
To skate fine art, you must have a body and a soul,
each of the first order; otherwise you will never get
out of coarse art and skating in one syllable.
Theodore Winthrop in Love and Skates, 1874, quoted in Skating, Number 59, April, 1937.
Art cannot be measured by points. We skate from
the heart. To us it is spiritual beauty that matters.
Oleg Protopopov (Olympic Pair Champion with his wife, Lyudmila Belousova, 1964, 1968),
quoted in The Complete Book of Olympics by David Wallechinsky, 1988.
It's your moment, Show them your soul.
Choreographer Sandra Bezic to Brian Boitano before he skated his long program in the 1988 Olympics,
to win the Gold. Sports Illustrated, "Great Skates," Vol. 68, February 29, 1988, p. 22.
While Chandler and Henie were universally applauded in the Ice Follies or in a Hollywood Review, a few visionaries dreamed in a dimension beyond Rockette-like drills, greatly costumed skaters in choruses not greatly skating, musical clichés and stars duplicating their own or each other's tricks in successive numbers. Penetrating critics wrote of boredom and skaters and coaches began tentative experiments, striving for union of music and figure skating.
Lively columns in Skating argued how to put a program together. Many of us said that music selection should precede program design and that skaters themselves had better choose their music; pools of crocodiles awaited us.
We learned not to incorporate a move we were able to perform only occasionally. We learned It was wise to consider one's manner of articulation. A legato skater, for instance, is not well matched with staccato music. A girl so slight as to be all but transparent had best not try a program to Ravel's thundering Bolero, lest she vanish altogether.
And we learned that we were almost all musically illiterate.
There were exceptions; at least two of my contemporaries who were fine skaters were accomplished musicians. For most of us, however, the search for music for a program was haphazard, and we more often than not made choices by reason of blind luck and an approaching deadline. Had we known what we were attempting, we would have despaired. Not only did we not know where to look but our music had to meet time constraints, either of competition or carnival. Then, as now, mutilations were not unknown.
As ignorant of choreographic technique as of music, and experimenting, we groped for a workable process, hampered by the prohibitive cost of ice time. We could not use our giant studio at will and so whether the skater or the coach choreographed a program, the work probably began at home, where one could replay a record to the point of memorization (and madness for other listeners) and walk through skating movements, humming or whistling, pausing now and again to make notes. First, a skater's best moves were spaced where they could be made to harmonize with the music, providing a kind of armature on which to construct the whole. The basic character of the program having been decided, attention turned to transitions - steps, spirals, spread eagles, special effects, turns, runs - having the several purposes of integrating the major features of the piece, while disguising acceleration or rest or building excitement for the presentation of a daring move. Throughout, body language was woven in for enhancement of the text.
The excitement of our search for more musically sensitive free skating was concurrent with the establishment in St. Paul of a virtually perfect setting for figure skating artists, a format that was the envy of many others in the nation whose combined influence on skating as an art is manifest today.
Orrin Markhus, teacher, producer/director, performer (fondly remembered as one of The Old Smoothies), tried a format of mini ice shows in the Auditorium to entertain convention audiences who sat at tables erected around the rink, night club fashion.
Delighted with Markhus' idea, the city fathers expanded it and launched the most successful civic entertainment in the history of St. Paul. Crowds packed into the Auditorium to sit either at rink side tables or in the balconies above. In respite from the heat outside, everyone surrendered to the charms of gemütlich evenings of music, figure skating and neighborliness while munching on popcorn and sipping beer. They called the entertainment "Pop Concerts," borrowing the name coined somewhere else.
Diverse elements were fitted together into an enterprise that functioned as cooperatively as the works of a clock. Central to it, of course, was the music itself, the superb voice of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Concerts, offered three times a week, featured two entractes of figure skating of about four numbers each that were dressed down, lightly rehearsed singles, pairs or ensembles of three or more.
Many prominent professionals came to this 'school', much as artists in residence, to teach, to experiment and to learn, thrilled with the music and a pool of first rate skaters at their disposal: Maribel Vinson, Vivi-Anne Hulten, Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Brunet, Bud Wilson, Willie Frick and, extraordinarily, an English ballet master, Stanley Judson, who ahead of his time saw that ballet training for figure skaters would become an essential ingredient in their preparation. These artists designed choreography and trained skaters in pieces vied with the summer symphony for spontaneity, charm and quality.
It was a bewitching atmosphere. We filled our patches with school figures while a clarinet tooted richly forth or a French horn sang a passage from a composition soon to be played. We free skated quietly in the great space and soft light, hearing each other's blades - a toe pick chopping a divot through the new, thin ice, the rasp of a scratch spin, a sibilant cross-foot, the zip of a take-off and the thud of a landing - or, when the orchestra played, we whirled around, exhilarated out of our minds, improvising moves to the music (and dodging each other) until forced to stop for breath.
When a rehearsal was announced, we cleared the ice. Thus we watched Maribel Vinson skate her unforgettable composition, designed for Valse Triste, of Sibelius and played magnificently by the orchestra. Vinson had come 'trailing clouds of glory' from the previous winter's presentations of the number to spellbound audiences in many U.S. cities. As we were to learn, her genius lay in her ability to bind skating to music and draw the spectator into her interpretation wholly and completely to the last note of resolution. Vinson was an arresting personality - original, vivid, probably the greatest female artist that American figure skating has ever produced. Her death, with her two daughters, in the 1961 crash was an irreparable loss.
But from her honored place in the Champion's Box in Figure Skating Heaven, Maribel, I am sure, is occasionally tempted to tip a wing in salute to today's performers and choreographers who are fired by the same inspiration that animated her, Grafstrom and Haines.
She would surely agree that nothing more exquisite has ever been seen on ice than Brian Boitano's performance in the 1988 Olympics. The choreography of the music from the movie, Napoleon, was perfectly to scale, unhurried, understated, symmetrical and as stunning as Boitano's heroic delivery at full bore. It is my guess that the judges' choice for the Gold did not, as Sports Illustrated5 averred, turn on Brian Orser's 'bobble,' a misstep so slight as to be unconvertible in numbers. I think the selection of the American Brian had its basis in his peerless artistry, a superiority that has magnified in the two years since that performance.
The competitive focus has sharpened. With the elimination of compulsory school figures from singles competition there will be less skating and less to judge. It is likely that artistic impression will become the combat zone for competitors, unless the technical merit score is allowed to inflate with triple, quadruple and even quintuple jumps. If they can agree on definitions, skating association officials are likely to have their own combat over which shall be given preference, more artistry or more acrobatics.
Susceptible to personal preferences or prejudices, the highly subjective mark for artistic impression can turn on a skater's choice of music, his style, pace, daring, confidence, carriage, maturity - or even physical attributes that affect line, form or delivery.
Where one judge may object to mangled music - five minutes of one-minute cuts from five disparate, wholly incompatible compositions - another may object to music featuring a vocalist, or even a singer. And a juvenile whose program is studded with jumps and spins of a difficulty equal to those skated by older competitors is likely to run into a judge whose decisions are made on the quality of the jumps, not the age of the contestant. And in a tight race, a judge may even give the edge to a skater whose body seems to enhance the performance, rather than appearing an imperfect instrument to be overlooked.
Furthermore, there are often contests in which the only clear winner has not skated. The champion is a phantom, a composite image carried in the heads of the judges who find the skaters before them poor substitutes for previous competitors. They choose because they must, but they are no more pleased than the bewildered spectator who thought the contest was somehow flat, and cannot bring himself to believe that sometimes None is best.
As figure skating has improved, the level of public understanding of it has been appreciably advanced, in no small part by television. Dick Button especially, counted in the rare few of greatest figure skaters of all time, has brought unexceptionable taste and sound judgment to his commentaries, enabling viewers to feel the great art of the Protopopovs, of Torvill and Dean, of Brian Boitano, of John Curry, Dorothy Hamill.
Thus, today's spectators have the best of all worlds. They can watch Boitano win the Olympics. They can take the kiddies to the ice equivalent of a dog and pony show to see Mickey and Minnie Mouse and friends, looking like a brace of diving bells; they can go to a competition of professional skaters, or see their favorites among the world's best skaters in companies of perhaps a dozen, performing entire shows choreographed by Christopher Dean or John Curry or Sandra Bejic, to name only a few of the artists whose works so enrich the contemporary scene, even as they celebrate the coming of age of a great performing art.
Footnotes
1Haines' enduring influence on figure skating was hardly proportional this brief life. Receiving no encouragement in America, Hairies took his vision and his talent to Europe in the winter of 1864-65 where he taught, proselytized and performed to the end of his life, variously held to have been in 1870, 1875 or 1879, in Finland.
2THE ART OF SKATING, Irving Brokaw, C. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1926.
3The same issue, in "Tests Passed, 1935-36" lists Miss K. Hepburn of the Skating Club of New York.
4The first film to star a skater, THE FROZEN WARNINGS, was made in 1915.
It featured Charlotte Oelschlagel, star of a German ice ballet company that performed for nearly four years in Berlin, enjoyed a run of almost a year at the New York Hippodrome and traveled to St. Paul to perform in the old Hippodrome . Creator of the fade or stop, Charlotte is said to have been the first woman to execute an Axel Paulsen in her program.
5SI, February 29, 1988, vol. 68, p. 20, "Great Skates."
Copyright 1990, Dorothy Snell Curtis. Used with permission.