| School and by the end of term, many times the second pair that the school provides the girls has to be returned. |
| Beyond that, she has always felt that shoes are like an ecosystem; you need shoes at all levels. First you need a new, hard pair of shoes for pas de deux and turns. Next a lighter weight shoe for adage and lastly, a really soft shoe for allegro or anything "white". She explains, "in any 'white ballet' you've got to be so silent." She continues, "the hardest thing for young dancers to learn is to get to the stage where they can wear the same shoes. They have to be strong enough to do a pas de deux in a shoe which is light enough to run down the stairs. This is part of the wonder of learning pointe work which is also part of the mystique." |
| From a professional dancer's perspective, she also feels having a longer lasting shoe is irrelevant. What if a dancer is doing "Elite Syncopations" and the shoes have to be dyed red? And the next night she's doing "Giselle". Sir Peter Wright always demands that shiny shoes be worn for "white" ballets, but other ballets like "Fille", "Bayadere" or ballets where you have to have naked legs would call for pancaked shoes. |
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| To Michele, the essence of what makes the Freed pointe shoe so good is the forepart. "If you want to look at a shoe and see how good it is going to be for a dancer, you feel how it is in the forepart. The hand-lasted shoes, even if they have a hard insole, have a slight 'give'...what we call 'the spring' in this area." This is because of the way the block substance is layered, put on manually and then hammered into the materials. What that means is that there is always air in the shoe. The foot gets warm and the air expands. |
| When the block is constantly banged...first by the maker and later by the dancer when she does a relevé.. it becomes warm to the foot and acts as a sort of miniature sandbag. Because of this, not only does it stop shock but also mutes noise. The sound is muffled because it is not a solid sound. Michele continues, "if a block is made of a polymer or a plastic type of material, there is a certain sharpness to the sound when it kicks the ground. You will never get this with a Freed's shoe because there isn't a solid substance in the block." She adds that putting padding inside the shoe may make it more comfortable, but it cannot genuinely dissipate the shock. |
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