This is an exhaustive compendium of all things pointe, including making the shoes, fitting them, sewing them, breaking them in, training in them and bThis is an exhaustive compendium of all things pointe, including making the shoes, fitting them, sewing them, breaking them in, training in them and being injured by them. The biggest takeaway is that no one agrees on anything. How to tie ribbons, what (if anything) to wear inside pointe shoes, when a dancer is ready for pointe work - all controversial. Let's not even get into rolling up to pointe versus springing onto it (though now having attempted both and succeeded at neither, I will become a proponent of whichever method I accomplish first).
The most fascinating part was Gaynor Minden and shoes made from "space-age" materials. Gaynor Minden flies in the face of centuries of shoemaking and basically makes Nikes in the shape of pointe shoes. Gaynor Mindens have injection-molded elastometric components so they never break, don't need to be/can't be broken in, and might last a month, rather than one performance. On the one hand, why isn't everyone wearing these? On the other hand, how dare they? Ballet is beautiful and impractical, and what I really want is a papier-mache shoe handmade by a grumpy old British or Russian man, which is about 99% of pointe shoes.
There's a terrifying chapter on foot injuries, a disconcerting number of which are contagious (ew). There are also fun tidbits from company shoe masters ("I put my foot in a pointe shoe once, and it was awful!") and dancers (male dancer Anton Wilson did pointe work to strengthen his feet and very vocally suffered from blisters and bruised toenails such that he dreaded the thought of having to perform, the poor dear). Paloma Herrera wears nothing in her shoes, good lord, Tiler Peck wears Ouch Pouches, and NYCB dancers like to wrap their feet in paper towels. And most of the dancers here agree that they want their shoes to be silent because apparently "dancing is more nuanced and magical when you cannot hear a sound."...more
This book is just amazing. It has a fantastic cover and is rife with fabulous photos and unsound health advice. It also caused me to meet a lovely, inThis book is just amazing. It has a fantastic cover and is rife with fabulous photos and unsound health advice. It also caused me to meet a lovely, insane flight attendant who said he used to teach at the San Francisco Ballet.
A bit sad, as my crazy madwoman's tour of ballet books written by/about NYCB dancers is coming to a close, with the exception of Edward Gorey's book, The Lavender Leotard, which features Edward Gorey drawings of Balanchine choreography. Obviously must get hands on this immediately. ...more