“On a November afternoon, seven young students twirled, hopped and lifted their chests to the sky, as Waltz of the Snowflakes from ‘The Nutcracker’ played through their computer speakers,” writes Siobhan Burke in Sunday’s (12/6) New York Times. “Gathered for a weekly Zoom class, they had arrived at a part of the lesson that one of their teachers, Jenny Seham, called ‘freestyle snow dancing.’ … Listening is a fundamental skill for anyone learning to dance, but especially so for Ms. Seham’s students. As a longtime teaching artist with National Dance Institute, which brings dance education to New York City children, Ms. Seham has worked for over a decade with students who are blind and visually impaired, in partnership with the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School. This year, for the first time, the music school—which serves students of all ages with vision loss—is offering a five-week ‘Nutcracker’ appreciation course to bring to life the holiday classic in a multisensory way…. Matthew Herrera, 12, … who is visually impaired … said that as a musician who studies piano and voice, improvising is one of his strengths—and the same goes for dance…. ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’ ”
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