Paw to Pointe

By:   Sallyann Mulcahy
Imprint:   Nonesmanneslond
Dimensions:   Height: 279mm,  Width: 216mm,  Spine: 16mm
Weight:   771g
ISBN:   9798990690714
Pages:   238
Publication Date:   04 October 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

SALLYANN MULCAHY fell in love with ballet when she was five. She attended classes in her Helena, Montana, hometown and a hundred miles away in Missoula, and summer programs on full scholarship in Aspen, San Francisco, and Banff. At fourteen, at Banff School of Fine Arts, she met Betty Farrally, co-founder of Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet, who invited her to relocate to Kelowna for full-time full-scholarship training at Canadian School of Ballet, which she accepted. Two years later, renowned Royal Winnipeg director Arnold Spohr recruited her for the company school's professional division. At eighteen, she took stage with the company's corp de ballet, and by the end of her first season was performing soloist work. Eventually she traveled east, joining Finis Jhung's Chamber Ballet USA in New York and New Jersey Ballet under founding director Carolyn Clark. New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson wrote of her dancing: ""The evening's most striking dramatic performance was that of Sallyann Mulcahy in 'Le Combat, ' William Dollar's ballet about a duel between a Christian and a Saracen warrior during the Crusades. When the Saracen's helmet is removed, the knight is revealed to be a woman. Looking fierce and taut, Ms. Mulcahy commanded the stage, proving a formidable opponent to the elegant Shi Hui, who portrayed the Crusader who came to realize that he loved her."" In 1991, while recovering from injury, Sallyann returned to Helena and accepted an adjunct professorship at Carroll College that would last nineteen years as Director of Dance and Artist in Residence. Her career ultimately spanned four-and-a-half decades of performance, teaching, choreography, and company direction. In 1995 she founded Montana's first and only professional ballet company, Artisan Dance, later renamed Ballet Montana, where she provided a one-of-a-kind training refuge and summer-performance venue for dancers from over thirty companies in America, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Russia. She choreographed, produced, and directed fifty-four works of contemporary and classical ballet, designing and constructing for her productions more than 300 costumes, including fifty tutus. She last performed in 2010 to Gustav Mahler's ""Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommenin"" at The Myrna Loy Center for the Arts in a pas de deux of her own creation titled, ""Song."" Sallyann's telepathic animal-communion studies and practice commenced in 2004 under the tutelage of Jeri Ryan, founder of St. Francis of Assisi Animal Institute. She began writing PAW TO POINTE during her second year of employment at an American Humane Society shelter. She offers animal-communication and ballet-consultation services while living off-grid in a secluded mountain valley with her husband, canines, and wild-animal neighbors.