A Sea of Ink

When I walked into my first ballet class, I was expecting it to be easy. I was not expecting the workout I received and I did not anticipate the sore muscles which followed. I was surprised at how something that looked so effortless could be so demanding on one’s body. I quickly learned otherwise. Although dance is not categorized as a sport but rather as an art form, ballerinas and their male counterparts are athletes. Few non-dancers understand the level of athleticism required to be a professional ballet dancer. Multiple myths suggesting simplicity surround ballet, perhaps as a result of the glittery costumes, stage makeup, and tights. However, a normal workday for a professional dancer, occurring 6 days per week, includes 10 hours of intense exercise, including evening performances. Outside work hours, dancers still make time to go to the gym and work on their upper body strength or do yoga and cardiovascular exercises to keep up their flexibility, strength, and endurance. It ta...

Trojans Top Students in the State Kelly Walsh Seniors Rank as National Merit Semifinalists The National Merit Scholarship program chooses 15-20 Semifinalists from Wyoming every September; this year, two are from Casper—Harriet J. Norcross and Jonah S. Spicher, KW seniors who excel in both academics and extra-curricular activities. Last fall, approximately 1.6 million high school juniors took the PSAT test and entered into the running for a National Merit Scholarship. In early September, 2016, 16,000 seniors were chosen as Semifinalists. In Wyoming, only 17 seniors were chosen; two of those students are from Casper, and both attend Kelly Walsh High School. Jonah S. Spicher and Harriet J. Norcross will learn in February, 2017 if they belong to the 15,000 students who will become Finalists in the program. The National Merit Scholarship program, established in 1955, awards three types of scholarships to students based on “ their abilities, skills, and accomplishments—without reg...

Eastern Europeans Flock to UK Number of immigrants working in the UK increases following Brexit decision.            After June vote for Britain to leave the European Union, the number of Eastern European migrants working in the UK has increased, due to concerns that immigrants will be barred from the country post-break.            According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of Eastern European migrants employed in Britain grew by almost 50,000 in the months between July and September alone. These figures show that, since the Brexit referendum, the total number of non-UK workers has increased by 241,000 to 3.4 million.            “This is yet another large increase in the labor force driven by an increase in foreign workers,” said the chairman of Migration Watch UK, Lord Green of Deddington. “This continuing in...

Creating a Holiday Classic The Moscow Ballet Nutcracker Behind the Scenes “I remember when I was little, really little, I would watch the NYC ballet every Christmas. I thought that was the coolest thing ever,” said 15-year-old Sophie Pickett, a dancer at Rising Star Tumbling and Dance Studio. “My mom had these pointe shoes for decoration in our house and they totally fit me at the time so I partied around in those during the Nutcracker, and that’s when I was like ‘I want to do this. This is cool!’” 29 Casper ballet students joined 40 professional dancers onstage December 7 th for a performance of the Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker. Following auditions with Moscow Ballet dancer Olena Nalyvaiko on October 17 th at host dance studio Beautiful Feet, the selected dancers were taught their choreography by Nalyvaiko herself, and then given seven weeks to rehearse. “It’s not just like one practice and its perfect, it takes so much work and time and dedication to this for...

Disney Presenting Pro-Feminist Females: What Do People Think of This Shift in Pop Culture? Disney’s princesses are not usually known for their strength of character. In the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty , title character Princess Aurora has only 18 lines of dialogue, and other early princesses spent the majority of their films doing housework, singing for the entertainment of passing suitors, and marrying whatever man had the inclination to rescue them from ill-meaning older women. Over the past few years, however, Disney has begun a new trend: the company has been incorporating more and more contemporary values into their so-called “princess movies.” “I think that it's admirable of the Disney company to be revisiting their former ideas of how women should act and how women should think,” said long-time Disney fan Abigail Chamb ers. Since the first Disney princess movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves premiered in 1939, the princesses have slowly evolved from secondary c...

An inescapable trait of mankind is the fact that all humans are naturally peppered with the blemishes of greed, ambition, and self-interest. A common occurrence in humanity is the incident of a person giving in to the temptation of greed, letting themselves slowly spiral out of control with desire, and eventually finding themselves in a place of negativity and regret. In the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Shakespeare portrays Lady Macbeth as an epitome of the darker side of human nature in order to demonstrate a common psychological cycle of self-interest through her actions of greed and ambition, followed by consequences of sorrow. A common theme in human history is that of greed. One is never satisfied with what he has, and this oftentimes means that a person will do anything to get what he wants. Lady Macbeth is a prime example of the consuming influence of greed. Even at her first entrance, she is wishing to be something else. Make me a man, she says, and “unsex me here” ...