Recommended listening and reading

I hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Recommended reading -
I just finished reviewing some recent articles about ballet which can be read by following the links below.

Recommended listening –
Listen to this interview from April 2007 with ballet instructor and former ballerina Kat Wildish. Very good interview where Ms. Wildish talks about her passion for teaching ballet to adults.
You can listen by going here.

Articles:
1. Ballet class keeps women on their toes
(my favorite of the bunch, really goes into the health benefits of ballet)

When 62-year-old Sherry Turtle suffered a brain aneurysmlast year, she couldn't tell her left from her right. That's until she joined a ballet class at the West Coast Civic Ballet.
Caroll Michels, 64, has a metal plate in her right ankle. The same class, which meets thrice weekly in Sarasota, helped Michels improve her balance.

Following a surgery to receive an artificial hip, Laurie Nord, 69, felt slightly crippled and psychologically didn't know her physical limits. The class helped her realize she can do almost anything physically, allowing her to feel like her "real self" again.

The class, at the ballet's center on North Lemon Avenue, is geared toward adults who do not dance professionally, but enjoy it or simply want to stay healthy
Read more here

2. Ballet a leap of faith for a Palestinian Billy Elliot
The story could have been drawn straight from the Billy Elliot movie script: A young boy who was first transfixed by ballet on television, and would dance secretly in his room at night, practising what he learned from films and Internet videos.

But Ayman Saffah is a young Palestinian-Israeli - as he prefers to be known - from a small village in the Galilee, and young men in traditional Arab Muslim villages don't dance ballet, at least not publicly. And so Mr. Saffah's path to a remote ballet school at Kibbutz Gaaton, the preparatory school for Israel's prestigious Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, has been riddled with stops and starts.

"I always wanted to dance," says the young-looking 17-year-old, wearing jeans and sneakers, a pair of sunglasses dangling at his neck. "[But] when I saw it on the TV or Internet, I saw many, many girls dance, but I never saw boys. So I thought I couldn't do it."
Read more here

3. Tulle time: Seamstress shows passion for ballet in custom tutus
Susi Hubbs presses her clog on the pedal of an electric sewing machine, and a needle begins jabbing though a satin ribbon into a pink pointe shoe. “I have to do this while we talk,” she says over the machine’s hum. It’s “Nutcracker” season, and “The Costume Lady” is swamped. Snips of fabric and trim coat the tables where her two sewing machines sit; bolts of tulle and spools of thread line the walls. A dozen tutus, many made of velveteen and sprinkled with sequins, hang along a mirrored wall. Hubbs pulls the shoes from the machine, snips a loose thread and hands the pair to Noel Amend as he walks through her doorway of her custom costume shop, The Costume Lady. “This is one amazing lady,” says Amend, co-owner of Assemble Dancewear, which houses Hubbs’ business. “She’s got people calling her from all over the world...
Read more here