She grabbed her shoes out of the bag and stretched on the floor. Loud music in the background, nerves crawling through her skin, yet all she could think about was sticking that attitude pose coming out of fouette turns. She puts on her shoes and flexes her foot to help wrap her ankle. She then ties the bow and tucks it in. Flex, point, flex, point – stand.
The moment her toes make contact with the wooden bottom of her shoes, an electric shock moves throughout her body. One hand at the barre and a screaming instructor in her left ear, she can’t help but feel the pressure of trying to be “perfect.” Her world revolves around these shoes and although perfection is a hard goal to achieve, she can’t see herself doing anything else.
“Pointe is a milestone for a lot of young dancers. When you’re young, that’s your biggest achievement,” said Stacie Nelson, director of The NY Dancers Studio.
As a teacher, Nelson trains her students with different levels of ballet. After they have reached the most challenging level, she suggests that they move forward and try pointe. She said students who want to try pointe have a true respect for the art.
“That’s when I know my job is accomplished, when they develop that passion,” said Nelson. “Dance is the most important thing in life besides my four daughters.”
Haley Johnson is just one of the many ballerinas at the University of Arizona. She found her passion when she started dancing at just three years old.
“The moment I first fell in love was when I saw a performance of the Nutcracker and I was in such awe of the ballerina on her pointe shoes,” said Johnson.
She feels most empowered and elegant when she is dancing on pointe, but admits the pain at first was unbearable.
“It took a lot of ankle strength to be able to maintain control on pointe. I was able to get over my box immediately when I first started but it was finding the ankle strength that was a challenge for me,” said Johnson. “Now, I feel liberated. My pointe shoes are my instruments.”
She started pointe at the age of 10 since it takes years for ballerinas to gain strength in their ankles. Without ankle strength, the dancer can easily injure themselves and be forced to continue dancing with regular ballet slippers if the injury isn’t that extreme. Instructors encourage their students to always stretch and do ankle exercises before starting to dance.
Nelson trains each of her students with ankle exercises at the barre as a warm up to her classes. Without those ankle exercises, new pointe dancers won’t have the strength to go on “releve,” a ballet term for when the dancer is standing on their toes.
While Johnson was able to overcome her challenges of learning pointe, Kennedy Thomas, a UA alum, was forced to quit pointe at 13 years old when she shattered her ankle from a horse back riding accident.
Thomas replaced her love for pointe shoes with jazz slippers once she received news of her ankle. She likes this style of dance most because it gives her a more empowering persona.
Pointe shoes acted as a saving grace for these two women. For Thomas, dancing relieves her stress and emotion through movement. Johnson dances to music composed by Phillip Glass or Ezio Bosso when she wants to loosen up. The metaphorical comfort of pointe shoes has made them feel free to express themselves.
“Dance is a gateway for me to become an idea, expression, or character. Being able to influence an audience in such a way they can connect with me is something I wouldn’t trade for anything,” said Johnson. “Pointe shoes allow me to step into a totally different persona.”
Pointe has made her more hardworking, alert, and an intellectual human in and outside of the studio. She feels an adrenaline rush of excitement that enhances her performance and technique during shows.
She has gone through “hundreds” of pairs of shoes and practices eight hours a day, six days a week. “We have our technique classes directly followed by rehearsals till 9 p.m.,” said Johnson.
Wen Na Robertson, also a UA dance major, started pointe at 12 years old and goes through a pair almost every month. If she has a show, she goes through about three pairs. There are about more than 30 different brands of pointe shoes, according to Ballet Box. Robertson wears a brand named Fuzi – which are usually priced at $69, adding up to about $200 a month.
The challenge of being on pointe is your constantly on your toes, literally. “My toes are all curled, discolored, bruised and UGLY,” said Johnson. Though, luckily for Thomas, her toes are still functioning since she still trains ballet in regular slippers. For Robertson, she used to tape all of her toes, wear toe pads, lamb wool, and jelly tips that fit over the big toes – after a year on pointe, she got calluses on her feet and that’s when the shoes became less painful.
Each dancer said the worst part about buying new pointe shoes is breaking them in. No one can just move in the shoe if they are brand new, so each dancer has their own tricks to speed up that process. The most common techniques are “pounding the wooden part of the shoe with a hammer to soften it, opening and closing a door on the wooden area, and cutting the satin off the wooden box and using a nail file to roughen up the sole,” according to Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre.
“When I receive a new pair of pointe shoes I usually squish the top of the box with my heel and bend the shank a little bit,” said Robertson. “Then, I measure the elastic and ribbons to my feet and sew them up. Once I’ve worn them for a class, they are usually broken in.”
Pointe is the foundation for every dancer and because of those fundamentals, Thomas currently dances for MSA Talent Agency. They have offices in New York, California, and Atlanta – where Thomas is currently living.
“Dance is my way of living, my career and without my pointe shoes, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Thomas. “I’m doing a lot of commercial work now such as movies, videos, and live dance performances.”
Robertson said she loves pointe because it’s a difficult and unique style of dance that most people can’t do. It pushes the human body to the limit in order to achieve incredible feats. Pointe is a weapon unlike any other, it is delicate but also fierce – a piece of history that dancers are still using and holding on to within the last 200 years.
“It’s incredible to see how pointe shoes were used back when they could barely get on their toes to the modern age where people accomplish unbelievable and endless tricks,” said Robertson.
Nelson not only teaches at her own studio, but has been performing for over 25 years. Aside from being a licensed practical nurse, she was an assistant choreographer for the Disney Channel commercial for the W.I.T.C.H. books series and continues to perform at many venues on Long Island, New York.
The drive and passion that these dancers get when they are on that stage is something the average person would never feel from the soles of their shoes but, for a dancer, it means the world.
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