RHV: Many of the positions and even the jumps are ballet based.
EF: No they’re not.
RHV: Elizabeth Fisch yes they are- there are many ballet positions, jumps end in arabesque, spirals in arabesque, spins in attitude or à la seconde, lifts in ballet positions. An axel is basically a tour jete with extra rotations. The list goes on and on.EF: There are many analogues, yes. But they are all different as well; and at its core FS technique is VERY different from ballet technique. To claim that a position or jump is “based” on ballet, one must show that it was derived from ballet, as opposed to convergent evolution. But we already know the history of FS jumps and positions, and we know they were NOT derived from ballet. FS positions were derived from the need to balance the body over a blade. FS jumps were derived from executing a figure, but going mid-air. Thus, the waltz jump derives from the 3-turn; the loop jump from the loop figure. Ballet had nothing to do with it. Ballet doesn’t have anything like the toe jumps, nor does it ever corkscrew or do “lazy H” position of the free leg. The list of differences go on and on…
To address your examples, it is mostly approximate convergent evolution. Jump landing is sort of like tendu dégagé back, except the free leg is at 8 o’clock instead of 6 o’clock. Spirals were originally developed without any reference to ballet (look at the world champs in 1930’s), but later FS adopted the ballet arabesque for them. Layback spin is sort of like attitude, but also different due to the physics of the blade: the whole body is pressed forward from the hips, rather than vertical in a ballet attitude. I’ve never seen any skater do any spin a la second with the free leg at 90 degrees. Pairs lifts… yes, they are pretty much like ballet lifts. Because once the person being lifted is no longer skating, it’s the same body and physics, and thus the same movement. There are only so many ways to lift someone without having them fall.
I’m curious what else is on the list that goes on and on. I am an actual ballet dancer, and I can attest that FS movement is less related to ballet than I at first imagined. And I say all this, along side other posts I’ve made on this thread discussing why the study of ballet can be helpful for figure skaters.
RHV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Haines
In my observation, when people groups start skating, they bring their dancing aesthetic onto the ice. Again and again. English Country Dancing ==> English Style Skating. Viennese Waltz Craze ==> International Style free skating / ice dance. Ballet ==> John Curry’s Skating. Breaking / Snowboarding ==> Freestyle Ice Skating. Modern Dance ==> Contemporary Ice Skating. Stylistically, all of these kinds of skating are “based on” their dance predecessors. But all of them, and hockey too, also rely on a shared technical foundation that was developed and documented in the context of English Style Skating, and as I’ve argued above is quite different from ballet.
Yes Jackson Haines was a ballet dancer, and also an excellent showman, and I identify with all that. There is no evidence that JH had anything to do with any “sport.” He was a ballet dancer (an art) working at a time that skating was widely considered to be an “art.” I have not found a single book from the 1860’s or 1870’s that uses the word “sport” to describe FS. By the 1890’s there were three distinct “schools” of FS: English Style, American Style and Viennese Style. We have books documenting all three, and they suggest that (a) there was plenty of cross-pollination between these three schools; and (b) the Viennese school retained the widest variety in skating, encompassing what the English and American skaters were doing and more as well.
The shift to sportification happened in the 1890’s with the founding of the ISU and a group of people who wanted to make a sport, which they based off of a simplification of Viennese practice, now renamed to “International Style.” Key ISU promoters then went around the world trying to get skaters to abandon whatever they had previously been doing and join their new, simpler sport. In North America, the first International Style competition held in 1914 (New Haven, CT) was a key event. Some in NA enthusiastically embraced International Style and the sport that came with it (Irving Brokaw, George Brown), whereas others felt it added little or nothing to skating practice and stuck with American style skating art (George Meagher). Thus, American Style art and International Style sport existed in uneasy competition. We have writings from all these people documenting this fascinating period of skating history (1890 — 1920). George Meagher was the undisputed expert on American Style skating (“Figure & Fancy Skating”), similar to how Ulrich Salchow was at the top of the Internatioanl Style.
USFSA was founded around 1920 and began to publish Skating Magazine; and during much of the 1920’s, they published propaganda saying the most awful things about American Style skating and the people who practiced it. At no time was George Meagher ever mentioned or quoted in Skating Magazine, these articles were hit pieces. As USFSA consolidated power, much of the knowledge embodied in American Style skating was buried / forgotten, and around 1930 Skating Magazine published an article crowning Jackson Haines as the “father of the sport.” It was revisionist history at best, but there was no one left to challenge their narrative. As they say, history is written by the winners. Today there is a Wikipedia Article on Jackson Haines, clearly based off the 1930’s Skating Magazine article), but but Meagher has not (yet) made it into Wikipedia:
https://skatecanada.ca/hall-of-fame/george-meagher/
https://www.skateguardblog.com/2015/01/george-alfred-meagher-champion-figure.html
Finding the “historical Jackson Haines” through all this is a challenge. Much of the best information may be in the German language book “Spuren auf dem Eise: Die Entwicklung des Eislaufes auf der Bahn des Wiener Eislauf-Vereines,” where Viennese people talk about how Jackson Haines appeared out of nowhere and taught them how to skate. AFAIK this book has never been translated into English or cited in English language skating history research.
So back to the question of Jackson Haines and ballet: I would say he brought aspects of ballet performance to the ice, most notably the idea of skating as entertainiment, an artistic spectacle to be viewed by an audience. In contrast, English Style skating was form of social dancing to be enjoyed by its participants, and American Style skating was more focused on drawing complex patterns on the ice, also to be enjoyed by participants. But none of this was unique: American style “fancy skaters” were free skating to music at the time as well. The mythology / propaganda holds that JH was rejected by stodgy Americans and then warmly embraced by more open-minded Europeans. Whereas in fact, JH left the United States because he was a dancer unable to make a living in theater during the Civil War. He was also a terrible father and abandoned his children in the process.
JH stepped into Vienna at a unique time: they were just beginning to ice skate, quite independently of JH, and they were also in the midst of the Watlz craze with Johan Strauss II and such. JH put these pieces together and showed Viennese people how to waltz on ice — which was different from how anyone, including JH, had skated before. JH was sensitive to the time and people he worked with. And thus, he became a founder of the Viennese School. He was a ballet dancer, but his contribution to skating aesthetic was informed by the dances of the people he met in Vienna: waltz, march (Kilian), Ländler, leading to the on-ice tradition of Viennese Rundtanzen. This led eventually to both Internatioanl Style free skating and to ice dance.
JH’s biggest contribution to FS techinque is the sit spin. There is nothing like it in ballet. A century later, John Curry probably did the most to integrate principles of ballet aesthetic into figure skating, some of which I discuss here:
https://www.artofskating.org/form-movement-quality-and-the-ultimate-waltz-jump/
But history has not been kind to Curry. IJS was a turning point: people involved in the decisions mention they could have had an art or a sport. In order to stay in the Olympics and the money / power that comes with that, they chose sport. Thus, the contributions of Jackson Haines and John Curry have both died a painful death in the sport since the 1990’s. Even JH’s sit spin has largely been abandoned today, in favor of other kinds of sit spins that have moved away from ballet aesthetic.
Luckily we can skate however we wish, we do not have to be bound by dictates coming from a committe in Switzerland.