| have taken place since Freed’s first opened have been innovations that closely followed the course of classical ballet. The shoes are in service to the dancer just as are the costumes, lights, scenery and makeup. As ballet technique has been dissected, refined, improved and quickened, the toe shoe has changed accordingly. Pointe dancers now spend a great deal more time on their actual toe tips than ever before. Thus the contradictory dilemma of a good shoe arises. The shoe must be simultaneously stronger and harder while being more comfortable. Of the toe shoes currently on the market, Freed’s is, to me, the kindest to the foot. It is the softest and lightest, with less substance and less actually weight than other shoes, thus its life span is necessarily short. Yet if a dancer is comfortable,
as she continues to dance she can rely less
on the shoe (whose support has dwindled) and more on the power in her own foot – a power that is considerable in a well-trained dancer. |
| A great part of the comfort lies in width. Unlike the 19th-century tubes perhaps only two inches wide, today’s shoes come in many widths: narrow, regular, X(wide), double X and, recently, triple X. There has also been a widening of the shoe |
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| tip, which has caused a severe problem: in the very center of the flat tip where the pressure is the strongest on pointe, a softening, not unlike a hole, occurred after only a few minutes of wear. This led to the development of the “platform.” The hard tips of Freed’s shoes are formed from layers of satin burlap, brown paper and glue; the platform is an extra triangle of burlap added to the layering. This triangle, an inch on each side, has largely eliminated the weakness, and we can now dance without fear of the soft spot through which we could feel the stage far too intimately. As a toe shoe begins its career, Kohler explained, it has a rapid but smooth progress into softness. With weight, work and sweat, the layering crumbles evenly
to form cushioning for the toes. The length of time between a new, rock-hard pointe (it feels and sounds very, very hard – like cement), which is noise- and blister-making, and its transformation into a soft, pliable cushion of padding, is very short. So Freed’s has reached an acceptable compromise that favors the dancer while remaining esthetically correct – a compromise between hard and soft. It is these two terms that dancers use to describe their shoes. We have “soft”-shoe ballets with many jumps – Taglioni in La Sylphide – and “hard”-shoe |
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