Pointe Shoe Confidential

The ex-dancers who sell ballet supplies at the Red Shoes in Pasadena like to tell this story: A bride-to-be came in one day, determined that toe shoes were just the thing to go with her wedding dress.

Not a good idea, she was told.

She wouldn’t so much walk down the aisle as hobble. After all, pointe shoes are the tool of a specialized trade, not a fashion statement.

But the bride was adamant--the pink satin shoes of a ballerina fit perfectly into her romantic fantasy, and she wouldn’t leave without them.

The Red Shoes workers reluctantly let her try on a pair (outfitting a civilian is really a breach of pointe shoe ethics) and stood back.

Sure enough, after wedging her toes into the rock-hard boxy point of the shoes and taking a few painful steps, the bride beat a path back to a regular shoe store.

It’s no wonder she had been deceived, though. There has always been something irresistible about the sleek curves of gleaming pink satin pointe shoes.

“They are the jewels of the body,” Balanchine used to say. “Something you cannot explain can be expressed on pointe.”

Balanchine’s choreography, and much of that of this century, emphasized the beauty of the legs and feet, elongated by the smoothly molded shoes. But their allure is not looks alone. Ask young ballet students why pointe shoes are so prized, and you’ll get one reason that has nothing to do with gauzy fantasies: They allow you to do things no one else can do.

On pointe, dancers can skim the stage and revolve with minimal floor friction, which makes them look as ethereal as their 19th century creators wanted. Over the years, the shoes have taken on other moods, and now ballerinas tower sternly over their male partners, spike the stage with pinpointed energy and aim their feet like weapons.

At first, it’s usually the delicacy and novelty of pointe shoes that have hundreds of girls each year begging their ballet teachers for approval to go “on toe.” This “Nutcracker” season there will be new recruits, but those who watch the Sugar Plum Fairy spin on tiptoe will be disappointed when they find that you have to earn the shoes slowly. Responsible teachers won’t start students on pointe before the age of 11 or 12, and then only after taking at least two classes a week for at least two years.

But once you’re hooked on the glamour and promise of the uniform, it’s sort of like the Army--you start finding out the grittier reality of “being all you can be.”

*

In one of the more florid ballet books about legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, there is a scene that has driven many a young dancer onward--to pursue excellence unstintingly, and definitely to stop by the drugstore for Band-Aids on the way.

“You must keep on your toes,” Pavlova at one point screams at a member of her troupe.

“I just can’t stand the pain,” the hapless girl replies. “My toes are bleeding.”

“You must!” insists the great ballerina. “You’re an artiste. Have you never seen me dance when I left a trail of blood on the stage?”

Whether or not this draconian scene took place back in the early part of this century, no one knows. But Pavlova was demanding, and those were the days before ballet pros held conferences on the health and well-being of dancers. Such lore laid the groundwork for the idea that masochism is part of the art form.

Offering proof of pointe dancing’s hazards, New York City Ballet dancer Toni Bentley quotes a colleague in a popular memoir of the ‘70s: “First I rub aspirin on my foot, then I put Saran Wrap around it, then an Ace bandage, then a sock and a heating pad--all night. Otherwise I can’t plie when I wake up.”

*

“Let’s face it, God didn’t intend people to dance on their toes,” says Carol Beevers, who has become a pointe shoe maven after decades in the shoe rooms of the National Ballet of Canada and the National Ballet School of Canada in Toronto. “It does hurt your feet, but they try to find healthier ways of doing it,” she says, citing as necessities good training, a good fit and not working “through the pain” of injuries.

An attractive, smallish woman in her 50s, Beevers speaks animatedly with a British accent. She defends pointe shoes philosophically: “A lot of things hurt--skaters have their ankle problems, hockey players have foot problems.” Beevers does not see a lot of masochism, since she has always worked for a ballet conservatory where consultations with doctors are constant.

These days, she fits not only conservatory students and professionals, but, in the newly opened-to-the-public National Ballet School shoe room, she’s also spreading “responsible pointe shoe rules” to anyone who comes in off the street. Not that she’ll sell a pair to just anyone. Like the fitters at the Red Shoes, she first inquires about previous training and teacher’s approval.

In the shoe room and at information sessions often held at shopping malls, Beevers happily explains the intricacies of pointe shoes and counters misconceptions. No, there’s no trick to the shoes, she tells the uninitiated; dancers just need to build strength and learn to “pull up” so that they don’t put undue pressure on their toes.

And no, the shoes do not have wooden blocks in the toes. The toe “boxes” are made of layers of fabric and paper, held together with glue and are shaped by hand before they harden. They are molded on fiberglass lasts (forms in the shape of a foot), but the lasts used to be made of wood, making the shoes “wooden blocked”--which led to the myth of having wood in the toes.

Beevers holds up a cross section of a pointe shoe, showing the thin leather sole and the layers of reinforced fiberboard on top of it, held together with tiny nails. The outside is invariably a shade of pink or sometimes white satin--it’s assumed that pink became traditional to approximate white skin. Following that logic, dancers of color often dye their shoes and tights to match skin color.

Pointe shoes arrive from the manufacturers all shiny and stiff and require extensive breaking in. Dancers complain that they’re perfect for about an hour before they become too soft to dance in. A professional or a serious student wears out from one to 10 pairs a week. At an average price of $55 a pair, parents groan and large dance companies (who get a discount and provide them at no cost for dancers) swallow huge shoe budgets--a quarter-million dollars for San Francisco Ballet, half a million for New York City Ballet.

Rising American Ballet Theatre soloist Gillian Murphy saves her company money by wearing a longer-lasting shoe--the high-tech Gaynor Minden, produced by a 6-year-old firm that uses synthetic materials. But in the tradition-bound world of ballet, innovations arrive slowly, and most dancers are hooked on shoes made the old-fashioned way.

The idiosyncrasies of dancers and their pointe shoes are something Beevers can recount in detail. To start, she holds up a fresh pair of Freed’s, a British brand that now dominates the European and North American professional scene. Like all other pointe shoes, they come unadorned, waiting for dancers to sew on ribbons and elastics to keep the shoe on.

Each dancer, Beevers explains, uses the kind of ribbon, placement and stitching they find works, most not trusting anyone else to do this labor-intensive task. Almost all dancers cut the satin off the tips (too slippery) and a few darn them with tiny embroidery stitches for durability. And most score the leather soles (too slippery again) with knives, wire brushes or paint scrapers.

Ways of protecting the toes in the shoes are myriad. “Students tend to wear heavier padding at first,” Beevers says. “Lamb’s wool is traditional, and now they have all these new gel products.” She points to a row of specialized aids--individual tiny socks for problem toes, “gummy spacers” to keep the big toe straight, partial or full all-toe covers. Most dancers eventually want to be able to feel the floor, and learn to keep their padding simple; many just tape each of their toes, or cover them with tissue or paper toweling.

In the shoe room, Beevers is surrounded by about 3,000 pairs of pink satin pointe shoes, piled in specially built cubbyhole shelves mounted on tracks with rollers. This afternoon, she’s fitting two dancers who work with small ballet companies in Buffalo, two hours away.

Pointe shoes come in dozens of models, with specifications so detailed that computerizes spec sheets for each dancer are often kept by ballet companies. Professional dancers usually order them custom-made, settling on their own maker. (Mini nervous breakdowns have been known to occur when one of Freed’s approximately 26 makers retires.)

The Buffalo dancers have been wearing Freed’s popular mass-produced Studio label shoes, which tend to last longer than the company’s lighter “performance weight” shoe. But something isn’t quite right.

Beevers kneels on a green foam pad to examine their feet on pointe and “on flat”; then she introduces them to a new, slightly roomier shoe that is being developed by Freed’s in Canada, named, appropriately enough, the Maple Leaf.

“In North America, our feet have simply gotten wider over the years,” she says.

The Buffalo dancers decide on the Maple Leaf, although one finds it a bit tight at the joint of her right toe.

“Ah, time for the bunion buster,’ Beevers says, bringing out what look like heavy black tongs to “persuade the shoe out a bit in that area.”

*

“Pointe shoes were just part of my life,” says Cynthia Gregory, former star of American Ballet Theatre, in Los Angeles last month to give a master class to young dancers at Conjunctive Points Dance Center. “They were with me everywhere.”

Would she have been a dancer without being on pointe? She doesn’t hesitate. “No. I loved being on pointe. I also did parts barefoot or with soft shoes, and I just never felt as comfortable, as right. I would relax sometimes in the studio standing on pointe, even when I didn’t have to.”

Gregory, dressed in loose black pants and a raspberry silk shirt, still looks as elegant as she did in her prime. She retired from dancing eight years ago, when she was 46, and although she recalls dancing “through pain” a few times when she was injured, she sustained no lasting ill effects from punishing her toes.

However, she nearly hurt herself when she was asked recently to don pointe shoes for a commercial. “It’s amazing how you lose it,” she says merrily. “I couldn’t even get up on pointe!”

But after a 31-year career, she doesn’t miss it and enjoys passing on the tradition. “When young dancers put on pointe shoes, they get very tentative,” she says, “and I want them to really cover space. I want to teach them to be free in pointe shoes, so they look natural in them. To relax in them is a very important part of being a dancer.”

“I don’t know who invented these shoes,” a sore-footed 15-year-old ballet student says after Gregory’s toe-intensive master class. “But I’m sure it was a man.”

No one knows exactly who invented pointe shoes, but it was more likely women who began exploring the mechanics of standing on their toes. When ballet was developing in 17th and 18th century France, women wore heeled slippers. Then someone had the bright idea of attaching them to wires so that they could land on tiptoe; the race for appearing more constantly heaven-bound was on.

Whatever the exact genesis of pointe shoes, by the peak of the Romantic era in the 1830s and ‘40s, the image of the female dancer as an ethereal delight was in high gear. Ballerinas were darning the tips and sides of their flimsy satin shoes, stuffing paper in the toes and strengthening their feet with grueling hours of exercises. Still, before the reinforced toe box was invented, they probably stood on full pointe only for brief moments.

There are a few lithographs of early ballerinas on the tips of their toes, but there were also complaints about the heave-ho arm-waving used to get there. It was the 1832 Paris Opera success of Marie Taglioni in “La Sylphide” that showed how well pointe dancing could fit into the mood of a ballet.

“She seems to float,” one critic pronounced, and, forever after, ballerinas have struggled to find the shoes that promoted this illusion, without destroying all the tiny bones and cartilage involved.

*

Onstage last month, the swan is preparing to die one late afternoon during the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts engagement of Russian ballet stars. Tall, willowy Yulia Makhalina, one of the Kirov’s leading attractions, is rehearsing to show lighting technicians her pathway for the famous solo, “The Dying Swan,” which she’ll perform that evening. She enters with her arms undulating, then hits a few dramatic poses before sinking to the ground. Even in a black T-shirt and baggy jumpsuit, Makhalina evokes the elegant ethos of the swan, except that she’s floating in flexible black running shoes instead of pristine pink satin.

Backstage afterward, she gladly brings out the real shoes--in her case, Russian-made Grishko’s, a brand she’s worn for 20 years, ever since she entered ballet school in St. Petersburg when she was 10. The shoes are slightly different from those made in the West--the thin casing around the edge holds no drawstring and comes to a V instead of a U over the toes. As do many Russian dancers, Makhalina cuts the V open wider and adds a cat’s-cradle of stitching across it. This is a traditional method, unknown here, of making the fit more snug.

More preparations follow: There’s the time-worn procedure of softening part of the shoes’ stiff box. “I hit, like this,” she says in her minimal but expressive English, demonstrating the way she bangs the top part of one shoe’s vamp (the front part of the box) with the other shoe in sharp, repeated thrusts that suggest the hammering of a nail. Indeed, many dancers actually use hammers to soften their shoes, or whack them against the floor or crush them in door frames. One dancer even wrapped them in a towel and ran her car over them.

But Makhalina’s breaking-in regime is more exacting. She explains why it takes finesse, holding a new shoe in one hand. “Must be hard here,” she taps the end of the shoe, “but soft here,” she presses the newly mushy top of the box. “And soft here,” she traces the section of the sole where her arch bends, “but hard here,” she points to the area that widens at the ball of the foot--the source of much onstage clacking when it’s not broken in enough.

For wood stages (as opposed to linoleum stage coverings), another procedure is necessary. She runs into her dressing room and emerges with a shovel-shaped Russian kitchen grater. “For carrots, yes?” she says, smiling. “But for me, it’s for shoes.” She grinds the toe, already minus its satin cover, into the grater and tatters the exposed canvas so that it can grip the stage. Rosin, the sticky substance used on violin bows, is also used to prevent slipping, but in pointe shoes, you can never be too careful.

Has dancing in the shoes for two decades caused any chronic problems? She shakes her head and waves the question aside. Then she nods--there is one toe that gives her trouble, but she does special exercises and even sometimes wears a spacer in one spot to avoid a threatening distortion.

But surely she must still experience some pain. “Pain?” she says, looking puzzled, as if she’d never heard the word in English. But it turns out she just doesn’t think about it. It was painful maybe at first, when she was a student; but now, she says, pointing to her exposed, reddened, bumpy feet, “I have special muscles here, no problem.” She shrugs.

“It’s my work, it’s my love. I don’t know--for me, it’s normal.”

*

Here’s the pitch on a brochure for Gaynor Minden pointe shoes, the only brand to commit to changing the face, as it were, of pointe shoes by introducing synthetic materials and--why did no one think of this before?--high-tech cushioning to lessen the strain of impact: “No more stomping or bashing your shoes,” the ad copy promises. “No tedious breaking in required,” and “no need for scraping or roughing.”

But Gaynor Mindens haven’t caught on at all yet among professional dancers. It’s as if no one can imagine a world in which ballerinas don’t bash, scrape and grate their pristine pink satin shoes.

It’s as if the paradox of the shoes--delicate-looking but tough--is built in. They symbolize the paradox of ballet itself--an art form that dictates grace, aplomb and seeming weightlessness for its female practitioners, while at the same time requiring thighs of steel, detailed control, and feet that can withstand a certain amount of abuse.

It’s a world enamored of tradition, and ballet dancers may not be ready yet to abandon their Spartan rituals. The shoes are like the bodies--young and fresh and all too soon in need of resuscitation. When pointe shoes sag, they can be revitalized (with shellac, super glue or floor wax) and their age disguised (with pancake makeup or calamine lotion). But what happens when bionic shoes threaten to outlive the feet that wear them?

Eliza Gaynor Minden, the former dance administrator who designed the upstart tech-age shoes, thinks that the rising generation of dancers will accept change more readily because “they feel that they’re the rightful owners of technology, and they feel they deserve it.”

It may well be that the production of pointe shoes is due for a revolution and today’s venerable, vulnerable models will go the way of high-button boots. What won’t disappear is the desire to answer the siren call of satin. It’s not so much an old-fashioned romance with pointe shoes that makes women flock to them, as outsiders often imagine; it’s actually a calling to a working relationship that takes dancers to higher and higher places.