Elizabeth Skating

Skating Art

Hello, I’m Elizabeth, a post-professional ballet dancer and now Skating Artist. I love all forms of dance, including those that involve balancing on a blade to create figure artwork. I do not participate in any sports. In 2024 and 2025, I won the International Open event of the World Figure & Fancy Skating Championships in Lake Placid, NY. Jackson Haines was also a dancer; and like him, I bring a unique background and perspective to the Art of Skating.

I am available to teach on-ice and in-studio. See here for more details.

This Website is About a Few Things:

  • All non-sport forms of ice skating and related dance traditions, including social ice dancing, Figure & Fancy Skating, English Style Skating, Contemporary Skating and the newer Freestyle Ice Skating. I approach these topics from a dance history / dance anthropology perspective.
  • Aesthetic Thinking. Skating Art is first and foremost a form of art, and therefore aesthetics are of primary concern. Form, function, symmetry, rhythm, movement quality, space and setting are all recurring themes, as well as the study, understanding and reconstruction of historical styles. These concepts are an integral part of any dance education but may be new to readers coming from competition figure skating sport. Our ultimate goal as skating artists is to develop our own unique personal style.
  • Technique! Skating, like ballet, is highly technical. Technique supports art, they are not separate. With good technique, our body and mind are free to express as we see fit, and nobody can take that away from us. For the skating artist, technique is (almost) everything, and there is no better way to build it than practicing figures. (Almost) anything else is a distraction. Technique is built up from constant principles that fit together like good mathematics. How do you get to Lake Placid? Practice, practice, practice!
  • Efficient ways to train our bodies as adults. I began my professional ballet training at age 28 at Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre and made it into the professional company two years later. Since my ballet career ended I have studied and performed Modern Dance, Chinese Classical Dance and Irish Dance; and then won the Figure & Fancy Skating event in 2024 after only 5 months training figures. I have also studied the violin all my life. Through these experiences I have developed an efficient and effective process by which we can use our adult minds to train our bodies to do anything within their capabilities. On this website and in person I share that process with adult students, breaking the myth that high technical achievement in dance is only possible for children.

Sections include: