A 63-year-old Chinese man who only started learning ballet a decade ago has gone viral on social media as a living example that you are never too old to follow your dreams.

Liu Ziqing has been a fan of ballet for as long as he can remember. He fell in love with it as a little boy, after watching The Red Detachment of Women ballet show in the early 1960s, more than 10 times, but he never really got the chance to practice it himself. Growing up in a poor family in a village near Baotou, the largest city in Northern China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, his main focus was always on helping his family and putting food on the table. Dancing was a luxury he could not afford. He ended up becoming a farmer but also worked as a street cleaner in order to make ends meet. But he never got over his love for ballet, and at age 53, he decided to become a ballet dancer.

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Guarding the border with North Korea is a very stressful job for the South Korean soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas, but they recently found a very unconventional way to unwind – taking ballet lessons.

Once a week, the young soldiers of the Koran army’s army’s 25th Division switch their heavy army boots for ballet shoes and take part in a ballet class intended to relieve some of the stress of guarding the world’s most heavily fortified border. Under the guidance of Lee Hyang-jo, a ballerina at the Korean National Ballet who started teaching at the base a year ago, the young soldiers struggle to do splits pirouettes and other ballet moves, as a way of relaxing.

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American ballet dancer Erik Cavanaugh is proving to the world that plus-size performers can be just as agile and graceful as their slim counterparts. His Instagram is filled with photographs and videos of himself performing ballet and other contemporary dance routines. He hopes to appear in music videos and on the Ellen Show, and his ultimate goal is to “change the mind and shape of dancers”.

Erik, 23, works at a pizza parlor by day and spends all his spare time dancing and choreographing. He learned the basics of dance at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School when he was much younger, and was encouraged to post videos of his performances online by his dance coach at his alma mater, Slippery Rock University.

Some of his short video clips feature him pulling off incredibly difficult and impressive moves, like multiple pirouettes, set to contemporary music like Justin Bieber’s Purpose and Jordan Smith’s Settle. The New York Post featured a compilation of Erik’s moves in a Facebook video, which went viral, inspiring millions around the world.

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Reports of visually impaired people performing regular activities with finesse are not new. However, such stories never cease to amaze us. The resilience and confidence displayed by some of the blind leave us awestruck, and sometimes the blind are even able to do things that people with normal vision are not.

Dance is one such activity. While it is almost inconceivable to think of a blind person being able to perceive and enact the dance moves of a beautiful and classical form like ballet, a Brazilian ballet school has managed to do just that – train blind dancers. And how they dance!

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Hundreds of ballerinas of all ages gathered on Monday, in Central Park, New York, to set a new world record for standing on pointe.

Led by a desire to leave their mark on the world of ballet dancing, 241 ballerinas from New York’s dance school attempted to set a new Guinness world record, by standing on pointe simultaneously. Most of them heard about the challenge online, and decided to “make history through dance” with other fellow ballerinas.

At the signal of Craig Salstein, a soloist with the American Ballet Theater, the ballerinas attempted to stand on their toes. 230 of them managed to maintain their pose for 1 minute and 7 seconds, thus beating the old record set last year. by 220 other ballerinas.

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