Sunday Afternoon Public Programs
November 20, 3:00 pm  •  Presented by
Zoé Austin

Giselle, the exemplary ballet of the European Romantic era, portrays the richly evolving relationship between a young peasant woman’s spirit and a royal count whose heedless deception precipitated her death. Spurred as a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment period, Romanticism valued the mysterious, the emotions, and the imagination where the living and the spirit world met.

Zoé Austin trained in classical ballet at the National Ballet School in Washington, DC, at Jacob’s Pillow, and at the Royal Ballet School in London where she was awarded the Three-Year Teachers’ Diploma by Dame Ninette De Valois. She studied Russian ballet technique with former master teachers of the Bolshoi Ballet and participated in Russian ballet pedagogy conferences at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Saint Petersburg, Russia on four occasions. Ms. Austin holds a degree in Physical Therapy from the UC San Francisco, and an MA in French from Middlebury College.