| or sensitive nerves on the lower ankles. With new orders placed four times a year, we have four opportunities to alter our shoes’ shapes, but with the long distance and paperwork that lie between us and our makers, we have grown skeptical about the amount of communication possible, and most of the ballerinas were determined to meet their makers in person. A professional working dancer may easily use 12 pairs of new toe shoes a week, and often more. Under average circumstances, a pair lasts for 15 minutes of performing and is then ready for class, rehearsal, autographs or, most often, the trash can. A used toe shoe is not revivable – this is the secret of the eternal demand for new ones. A toe shoe is as eccentric as the ballerina who wears it; their marriage is a commitment. |
| Though experts at demolishing a new shoe, we had been ignorant of the materials and processes that precede our more destructive actions. A brand-new pair of toe shoes presents itself
to us as an enemy with a will of its own
that must be tamed. With the combined application of door hinges, hammer, pliers, scissors, razor blade, rubbing alcohol, warm water and muscle power – followed by repeated rapping against a cement wall – we literally bend, rip, stretch, wet, flatten a |
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| new shoe out of its hard immobility into a quieter, more passive casing for our feet. |
| Without music, lights, scenery, costume or false eyelashes, a ballerina can still dance, given some space. But if her shoes are taken away from her, she loses her technique, her grace and her ephemeral quality. She will literally descend into the world as a mere mortal if her means of support is taken from her. In the ballet La Sylphide, the sylph loses her wings and is thereby destroyed. But it was not wings that gave the famed original sylph, Marie Taglioni, her lightness, it was her pointe shoes. At her debut in 1822, Taglioni brought classical ballet onto pointe, and it has stayed there, sometimes shakily and with much pain, ever since. It is Taglioni whom we have to blame. Had she not been so charming, so ethereal and so graceful on her
toes, the whole idea might have been dismissed
as an unsuccessful experiment. Each time one of us stands on our toes it is still an experiment that we would often condemn as unsuccessful. But we are 160 years too late in voicing our feelings – besides, the applause contradicts us! And so we are silent; our complaints could not begin to compare with those of the early ballerinas. |
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