The world of ice dance has had some good news recently. Canadian ice dance duo Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who set the competition on fire at the Vancouver 2010 Games with their shimmering golden moves, took the floor this month at the Skate Canada Autumn Classic International. This is their first performance together in almost two and a half years; the last time they skated they won the silver medal at the 2014 Sochi Games in Russia. And unsurprisingly, the score of 77.2 points they earned in the Short Dance was well ahead of the Danish pair who finished in second place.

However, there is still the Free Dance part of the competition ahead.

Ice dancing is a popular sport that is part of the discipline of figure skating; it became an official Olympic sport in 1976. As the term implies, the routine involves a couple consisting of a man and a woman performing twists and rhythmic dance moves to a piece of music. There are strict requirements for performance to be judged, such as no jumping or throwing, and no more than two arms spread apart.

Ice dancing differs greatly from figure skating, where the skaters’ skills focus on jumping and spinning and precision footwork. This is one of the reasons why the Artistic Director of Ice Dance International, a professional company that performs all over the world, is interested in moving the activity from a ‘sport’ to an ‘art’. Ice dancing is all about expansive power and speed, flow and flight and the pattern that we can see on ice and is therefore more of an art than a sport discipline.

In the 1930s, many elements of what are known as compulsory dances comprised movements developed by ice dances from Great Britain. Since joining the World Championship in 1952, British teams have won twelve of the first sixteen world championships. Movements back then were directed more towards a vertical carriage and angular movements. However, beginning in the 1960s, as more ice dances from Europe began to join in, a new trend in dance moves began to emerge that involved more upper body movement and increased speed.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet dancers took center stage through their more theatrical styles based on ballet elements that emphasized extended line and speed rather than difficult footwork. The Russian couple of Lyudmila Pakhomova and Aleksandr Gorshkov won the first international title when the ball became an official medal event.