With 321 images, trace figure skating's eight centuries of history. See the impact it has had on the visual and performing arts, from early depictions of animal bones tied to the feet to facilitate movement over frozen streams and lakes to the latest precision-engineered blades used by Olympic champions and the birth of contemporary free-style skating. Fans of figure skating, memorabilia collectors, and historians will treasure this in-depth look at this popular activity.

    The company at sixty is a company of its time, engaged in creating challenging new work, yet committed to maintaining the classics of the past, favourites like Swan Lake, The Nutcracker,and The Sleeping Beauty.One hundred and fifty photographs from the companys archives illustrate this definitive history, filled with eyewitness accounts, backstage glimpses, and fascinating detail. This is a record of one of Canadas boldest cultural experiments, a book to enjoy now and keep forever.

    Yet figure skating was once an exclusively male pastime - women did not skate in significant numbers until the late 1800s, at least a century after the founding of the first skating club. Only in the 1930s did figure skating begin to acquire its feminine image.Artistic Impressions is the first history to trace figure skating's striking transformation from gentlemen's art to 'girls' sport. With a focus on masculinity, Mary Louise Adams examines how skating's evolving gender identity has been reflected on the ice and in the media, looking at rules, technique, and style and at ongoing debates about the place of 'art' in sport. Uncovering the little known history of skating, Artistic Impressions shows how ideas about sport, gender, and sexuality have combined to limit the forms of physical expression available to men.