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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.
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""
