The Fragile Architecture of Weightlessness

From the mezzanine, the ballet pointe shoe looks like an instrument of the supernatural, a scrap of pink satin that lets a dancer cut her ties to the floor. Up close it is a structural marvel with the lifespan of a mayfly. Few tools in the performing arts take such ritualized punishment or fail on so tight a schedule. A principal at a major company can wear out a pair in a single evening, burning through days of handwork in a couple of hours to keep the illusion of flight aloft.

The shoes are still built by an old-world cobbling that has refused to industrialize. Most are made by the “turnshoe” method—stitched together inside out on a wooden last, then wrenched right-side round by hand. The toe box, the stiff cup that has to carry a whole body’s weight, is neither molded from polymer nor carved from wood. It is a reinforced cage of papier-mâché, layers of burlap, paper, and fabric cemented together with a specialized paste. illumin.usc.edu

The design answers a long history of strained feet. When Marie Taglioni first rose onto her toes in the early nineteenth century to play a sylph, she did it in little more than soft slippers, trusting to ankle strength and darned fabric to hold the pose. Anna Pavlova built the modern version. Cursed with high, unstable arches, she slid toughened leather soles into her shoes and hardened the box, turning a slipper into a platform. ballet.org.uk

The catch is that the shoe has to be half-wrecked before it works. Dancers break in a new pair by hand—crushing the box with their heels, scoring the soles with knives, bending the shanks to the curve of the arch. After that the decline comes fast. Under the stage lights and the torque of one pirouette after another, the glue softens and the internal support gives way. newyorker.com The vessel of flight becomes a limp bundle of fabric and paste, thrown out once the curtain falls, its short violent job done.