Kids Corner, Wheelchair dance in Wisconsin
©2016 Harold W. Thorpe and Karyn Saemann This article is 4th in our four-part series on wheelchair dance in Wisconsin. The Kehl School of Dance in Madison, Wisconsin, is marking three years of offering Sitting Ballet to students who have limited ability to...
Kids Corner, Wheelchair dance in Wisconsin
©2016 Harold W. Thorpe and Karyn Saemann Sharon Saltigerald isn’t priming professional wheelchair dancers. “I’m never going to be that dance teacher,” she says. Her aim is far simpler: bring joy to severely disabled people through music and movement. It need be no...
Kids Corner, Wheelchair dance in Wisconsin
©2016 Harold W. Thorpe and Karyn Saemann In the third-grade, Elizabeth McVeigh started a Flying Fingers club, where classmates learned to sign with a hearing-impaired girl. The name was the same as a popular series of children’s 1990s mystery books, The Flying Fingers...
Kids Corner, Wheelchair dance in Wisconsin
©2016 Harold W. Thorpe and Karyn Saemann It’s an unusually warm evening in early November 2016. UW-Whitewater Dance Professor Barbara Grubel and two-dozen other dance students and dance teachers from across Wisconsin are seated in a circle, on the floor, in a...
Kids Corner, Wheelchair dance in Wisconsin
©2016 Harold W. Thorpe and Karyn Saemann Bellamy’s Ball, Harold W. Thorpe’s 2015 picture book about a Wisconsin girl who uses a wheelchair and learns to dance alongside her friends, is fiction. In real life, the idea that everyone can dance, regardless of physical...
