There’s something so uniquely soothing and satisfying about seeing these women (it’s mostly women—male dancers are usually too heavy to go on pointe) ready the tools of their trade.
There’s the slipping of the original, light-pink shoe out of its bag, and then the hours spent scraping, ripping, crushing, sewing, and burning (!!), only to end up with a shoe that looks identical to the layman but is uniquely tailored to the ballerina.
It’s almost like the dance’s most distinctive qualities—exterior perfection, inner struggle, insane physicality—get concentrated in the shoes. Even early retirement: After one or two stage performances, the shoes begin to “die.”
You would think all these hours of shoe preparation would make dancing on the very tips of the toes less painful, and you would be wrong. Dancers describe using everything from alcohol soaks to tooth-numbing gel to get through their practice sessions.
Here, the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Kaori Nakamura opens with, “Does it hurt? Yes.” Especially right now that she’s dancing Sleeping Beauty, she adds, “Yep. Very painful.”
Still, without the perfectly bespoke shoes, the gravity-defying art of pointe would be all but impossible. “They’re part of my body,” she says, “like skin.”
This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.
*Image of “ballerina“ via Shutterstock
