It’s getting cold out there. I don’t know about you, but I look like Quasimodo hunched over trying to navigate the slippery sidewalks. Ice is not my friend unless it’s in a cocktail. Fortunately, this week’s Portrait is much better equipped to conquer the ice. Isaac Lindy is a Philadelphia-based figure skater and contemporary dancer with professional performance, touring and choreographic experience across and between both disciplines. As a professional skater, Lindy toured for three seasons with Holiday on Ice throughout Europe and has performed with Nathan Birch and Tim Murphy’s The Next Ice Age. He is a U.S. Figure Skating Association gold medalist and a Professional Skaters Association-certified coach. I had the pleasure of seeing him perform with the wonderfully fresh and inventive Canadian Montreal-based contemporary skating company Le Patin Libre last month and chatted with him about life on ice. Some responses have been edited for length or clarity.
Where did you skate into this world?
I was born in Philly proper, and we lived here for about a year and a half and then we moved to Bala Cynwyd. I grew up in Bala and went to school in Lower Merion Township.
Booo! I went to Radnor. You sir are the enemy!
[Laughing] I know, the Radnor/LM rivalry! Ha, this is a rough way to start the interview, so sorry!
Because you’re so nice, I’ll let you slide. Tell me a little about the family. Are you the only one in the arts?
I come from an artistically inclined family. Depending on which side of the family and their immigration story, I’m third or fourth-generation Jewish on both sides. So the arts weren’t an acceptable path until about my generation. A few of my cousins are also creatives. Many of our parents were involved in the arts too, until they were pressured into going to school for something more “practical.” Because of a lot of support — and honestly, a lot of privilege — my generation was allowed to pursue the arts in a way our parents and grandparents were not able to. So family — two parents, mom and dad who still live in the house where I grew up, and a younger sister. She’s 29 and we’re three years apart. My mom was a creative director in advertising for a long time and then freelanced but mostly stayed home to raise us. My dad is a lawyer. He had his own criminal defense practice for most of my life and worked with the US DA and US Attorney on the prosecutorial side before that. Now he works for the city. But Dad plays the guitar and did a lot of theater growing up and Mom paints and grew up as a serious ballet dancer, so art was definitely in the mix.
With a father who worked in the criminal justice field, did that make you more inclined to be good or bad?
I never felt like, “Oh, I can do this and my dad will get me out of it.” I had a healthy and grounded understanding of trouble. I wasn’t afraid of it, but knew what it looked like and the consequences.
I read that you started figure skating competitively at 5. Is that correct?
I originally asked if I could take ballet. I was 4 so I don’t remember where the idea came from. Maybe I saw pictures of my mother, I don’t know, but she was pretty apprehensive about me dancing for her own reasons, so I didn’t. Then a year later, I saw ice skating on TV. I asked if I could do that and my dad took me to the rink at Penn. I took their public group lessons and then the coach there told my dad that if I wanted to continue to excel — and she felt I could and should — that I needed to go to a different rink. So at 6, I started taking private lessons in Ardmore at the Philadelphia Skating Club and that’s where I trained for 12 years.
What was the first impressive move that you were able to do?
Well, the first thing I thought was impressive? I’d been watching the 1998 Nagano Olympics with Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski. One of the elements they did was called a camel spin where your leg is raised up behind you, parallel to the floor and you’re leaning forward, chest parallel to the ice as you spin, so you look like a T. I remember holding myself on the boards and flipping my body around with my leg whipping behind me. I bet it was barely off the ice; it was just sort of me holding onto the wall. But I thought I was doing a camel spin. Skating has a pretty steep learning curve, but as a young kid, I learned quickly. I was doing double jumps by the end of elementary school and was pretty competitive through sixth and seventh grades.
I am the least athletic person in the world, but I love watching sports, especially skating. But I still can’t tell the difference between a triple Lutz, a double axel or a Salchow.
So, there’s a hierarchy of jumps, six different jumps, and you learn your singular rotation jumps first, then you move onto your doubles and your triples. I’ve never jumped triples, but I could land a double Lutz, double toe loop combination. That was probably the hardest thing I could do. You know very early on whether or not you’re going to make it competitively, like the skating that we watch on TV, or going to the Olympics and the field separates itself very quickly.
Around 11 or 12, I wasn’t landing my double axel or triples and I wasn’t even close to getting them. It wasn’t like, “OK, if I really double down, I’ll get them. It just wasn’t happening, so that’s when the shift from competitive skating started for me. My technique for skating skills are pretty strong, my edge quality and extension and that stuff. I’ve always really enjoyed that side of skating, how to use your blades on the ice, etc. For years, my coaches told me I should have been an ice dancer, and I resisted because I really wanted to jump, even though I wasn’t very good at it.
How would you or others have described you as a kid? You were obviously athletic in your sport, but any others?
In some aspects, I was athletic, but I didn’t really play any other sports. Skating took up too much time. Anything else I did in school was more creative or academically oriented. So I don’t think people would have described me as athletic! My sport was basically invisible to the school, I was really small, and I wasn’t any good at running, so I wasn’t a traditional sports person by any means. But I was really outgoing. People would have said that for sure. I never shut up in class. That was a problem. Though school came pretty easy to me.
I was reading that you went to Vassar. So what made you choose that school? Is it still predominantly female?
It’s pretty evenly split now. My older cousin went there and I visited twice while he was there. I was academically successful in high school. Going to Lower Merion, everyone around me was applying to colleges but I really didn’t know if I wanted to go to college. It wasn’t a clear goal, like wanting to go to the Olympics. But I also had a friend who went to Vassar and I really connected with his friends too when I visited.
But honestly, what it came down to was that there were very few core curriculum requirements, you could really make it your own. I liked how small and intimate it was. And I liked that politically and socially, it was very much farther left than I was used to out in the burbs. At that point, I was really wrestling with my sexuality and Vassar was the only school where someone asked me how I identified when we met. I was like, “That’s crazy.” And so that was why I went. The advice from my friend was also a factor. He said, “Just think about what kind of person you want to become when you’re making this choice and you’ll be fine.” And it ended up being amazing.
It’s interesting, because from the outside, people think of skating as being a very gay sport, and yet for years, the only openly gay skater was Rudy Galindo. And correct me if I’m wrong, there still haven’t been that many openly queer skaters, just Johnny Weir, and my girl Amber Glenn.
And Adam Rippon. He was actually the only out Olympian while competing, Johnny wasn’t even out out. He wasn’t directly talking about his sexuality. Skating is an incredibly conservative sport. The stereotypes are true to a certain extent, but there’s also so much stigma that as a man into skating I grew up getting bullied nonstop because people assumed that I was gay, even though, as a kid, I really didn’t think I was. I didn’t choose skating because I was gay, I chose skating because I wanted to skate. And then, I don’t know how it happened that my sexuality aligned with the stereotype of skating, but most of my colleagues are not gay.
In a cast of skaters, it’s usually maybe 75 straight, 25 gay. [Laughing] I feel like I’m being like a straight apologist, like, “not every figure skater is gay.” But I was being told that I was gay before I knew what the word meant, because skating has such a strong association with homosexuality, and the stereotype is not true.
I think maybe it’s more about femininity than sexuality. People see men in “tights” wearing feathers and stuff, and associate that with homosexuality.
Yeah, we don’t separate femininity and sexuality very well in this country. I work with a lot of Eastern European people, and that association doesn’t register in the same way at all there. It’s just considered expressive and artistic.
I remember talking to a dancer who was almost afraid to then come out as a gay dancer, because it was like, “Oh, great. Now I am the stereotype” kind of thing.
I mean, that really resonates. When I was in high school, advocating for my straightness was saying something that I felt was true. I felt the need to have a certain number of male friends to demonstrate that I was one of the boys. When I started questioning more internally and talked to my family about it early in high school, I was really almost, like, disappointed that I was maybe fulfilling the stereotype after all.
Then late in high school, I talked to a couple close friends about it, saying, “I’m not sure, but it seems like I don’t have crushes on girls like I used to, and I am noticing that I’m more attracted to, well, I wouldn’t have used that language. Something like, “I’m noticing that guys are hot,” is probably what I said in 2008 and then my freshman year of college, I started dating guys. So I came out in stages and a series of conversations with friends in high school, and then family. It was in my sophomore year of college, when I was dating someone that I went wider with the conversation to aunts, uncles and cousins and friends I hadn’t talked to up to that point. So I kept a pretty small circle of people I was processing it with for about six years before being completely open.
Tell me a little bit more about your dance career off the ice.
My professional career as a performer started off on ice. As I mentioned, I knew that the ship had sailed regarding my competitive career in skating when I was 12. I did a little bit of ice dance at the very end of high school, sort of like a last-ditch competitive effort. But I was 17 at that point, which was late to start a new discipline, so by the time I went to college, I had no expectations of returning to skating.
At Vassar, my freshman fall changed my life completely. I took a modern dance class, Martha Graham technique with Steve Brooks. I was like, “Oh, this feels like skating.” I had taken dance for skating before, and I had done musical theater — but I had never taken a modern class in a studio like this. So I started training as much as my schedule would allow at Vassar. And I really fell in love with dance, loved being in the company. I had a training mentality from skating that I was able to apply to dance, and I even turned down a teaching fellowship after college, like a crazy person. I was like, “If I don’t audition for dance now, I’ll never do it.” So I moved back to Philly after Vassar and started auditioning for dance companies and dance jobs. I got hired as an apprentice with Alchemy Dance Company, which doesn’t exist anymore, and performed with Anne-Marie Mulgrew’s dancers. I was starting to learn about the Philadelphia dance scene. Do you know Seán Curran?
Yes! He’s from Ireland, I did his Portrait profile a while back.
Yes, he had taught some master classes at Vassar while I was there. I knew him in passing, and he was choreographing and running the audition for an opera at Opera Philly, and they were looking for a principal understudy. I was 22 and hadn’t studied at some fancy conservatory but I went to the audition. Seán basically did me a favor and hired me, which gave me my union card, and gave me a real-deal job and a real-deal resume line. It completely changed my concept of whether it was possible or not to pursue this career.
I continued to freelance in Philly for a few years. Then I had a foot injury that made me think maybe I was done with that chapter of my post-collegiate dance career. In 2017, I was teaching a little bit at the ice rink and I decided to put my skates on. I’ve never stopped skating, but I would skate maybe twice a year. But that summer, I was skating more and the company Le Patin Libre was auditioning for the show that you saw. I had been back on the ice for about a month after barely skating for seven-and-a-half years. But I went to the audition and got it!
That’s great! I want to get into that a little bit more, but first I wanted to ask you about your trip to Senegal and to Dakar.
I did my semester abroad there. I lived in Dakar and Senegal with a host family for two-and-a-half months, and independent study for a month.
What’s something that most people don’t know about either Dakar or Senegal?
That’s a very good question. Generally speaking, we have a complete misunderstanding and misconception of Africa in the US, starting with the fact that we call it Africa. It doesn’t mean anything to say Africa. It’s just like saying North America, like, North America where? It’s a big continent. Life was very different…the pace, the politics, the expectations..really, really different, sometimes really hard for me to navigate. But people want to exoticize it. I was really adamant about coming back, especially when the family was like, “What was it really like being over there?” I think something that stuck with me was that it was really important to remove any value judgment from it. It’s just really two points on a spectrum of places in the world that are very different.
An interesting thing is that people love to run there. At sunset, the highway along the coast is packed with hundreds of people going on a jog. It’s not a formal club, just a sea of people going on runs. I even became a runner for the semester. And it’s stunning there. It’s the westernmost point in Africa, so it’s practically in the ocean. When the sun sets, it is huge, and as it descends, it’s really, really striking.
Beautiful. I was reading a little bit about you talking about what skating and/or dancing does for you emotionally.
I mean, movement is very cathartic for me. It feels like a home-based language, almost. A lot of dancers and skaters will say that they can say things that they can’t say with words but I also like to write and I like talking, and I feel very expressive in language. So I don’t think that skating and dance are like a linguistic substitute for me. But with the physicality of both dance and skating, you have to really lock in and I find it can quiet my mind in a way that very few other things can on a good day.
I understand you’ve done a lot of work with kids. What was a funny moment?
We often teach a lot of siblings. One sibling will start skating, and the younger one comes along and wants to learn. I was teaching an older brother and his younger brother had fallen on the ice and was crying. The brother came up to me and goes, “He’s just being dramatic. That’s just how he is.”
[Laughing] That must have been hard to keep a straight face! All right. Let me just pull a couple of random questions for you. Something you’re an armchair expert on.
This is a boring answer, but 1990s skating. I feel like I could do really well on “Jeopardy!” in that category.
Your favorite indulgence?
Chocolate chip cookies.
Someone I’d love to be stuck in an elevator with or pair skating with.
First thought, best thought. I would love to be stuck in an elevator with Kacey Musgraves. I love her music a lot, but I heard a couple interviews with her recently, and she’s pretty compelling. We’re around the same age, so I think I would love it if we just could chat for a sec. I think it could be cool. Yeah, and maybe if she wanted to skate, I would not be opposed.
Celebrity encounter?
Growing up, my coach was Johnny Weir’s choreographer, when he was just starting to compete at senior nationals, a few years before his Olympic year. Johnny’s about eight years older than I am so he was about 16 when he came for a lesson with my coach, Michelle at Ardmore. I remember he came from the King of Prussia Mall, and he was showing her everything that he bought, including a rhinestone, purple bandana. And I was appalled. I was like, “Who is this person?” He was doing his lesson with her and I was doing my thing on the ice when she asked him to do an element called star turns. She asked him to do 10 in a row and he was like, I can’t do 10. And she said, “Isaac, go do 10.” So I did 10 in a row. I got to show up Johnny Weir on that day!
Fun! Favorite piece of clothing, either now or growing up?
For two years, starting in preschool, I only wore stretch leggings that were pink or purple. I was really obsessed with those pants.
[Laughing] So that question could also go under, “What was an early sign you were gay?” Do you have a favorite motto or saying or quote?
Well, it’s not that uplifting, but I think it’s sometimes grounding, “There’s no there.” I think we often fantasize about other places. The grass is always greener, as being a fix. Touring is like being in motion, and some of it is great, and does solve some problems, but I just really try to remind myself to bloom where I’m planted.
That makes sense to me.