A Brief History of Pointe Shoes and Ballet

Aug 26, 2011
Sarah Bezek

There are many brands of ballet pointe shoes available, all designed to be supportive and flexible to help the ballerina dance. - By Lambtron (talk)Lambtron at en.wikipedia Later version(s) were uploaded by Editor at Large at en.wikipedia. [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Pointe shoes are now an important element of advanced ballet, but ballerinas did not always dance en pointe. They are part of the evolution of dance shoes.

A slender female dancer, posed on a single pointed toe is now an iconic image synonymous with ballet. Dancing ‘en pointe,’ as it is called, is now a professional standard of ballet dancers around the world; however, pointe was not always a part of ballet. The following article explains the development of ballet’s use of pointe shoes.

Ballet Before Pointe Shoes

The dance form ballet is an evolution of the court dances of Europe, where the nobility and royalty of both genders would dance intricate patterns in fashionable shoes that had a small, thick heel. As ballet progressed from a dance of social interaction into a codified form of theatrical dance (which happened in the late 1500s), the shoes were transformed as well. The first change was from the demand of dancers who found the heel clumsy and a nuisance. These dancers, including Marie Camargo, removed the heels from their shoes in the 1700s, creating an early version of the ballet slipper: the soft and flexible shoe that is still worn to ballet classes today. The ballet slipper allowed for a larger quantity and quality of movements.

Early Pointe Shoes

These soft slippers are truly the beginning of pointe shoes. While historians disagree which ballerina began dancing on the tips of her toes first, all agree that it began in the first two decades of the 1800s, when several ballerinas began to find ways to balance on a high pointed toe, in an attempt to look ethereal and light. Dancers of the Romantic period of ballet would stuff cotton into their shoes as well as repetitively stitch the fabric of their shoes to reinforce them. Some dancers that were among the first to do this to their shoes were Marie Taglioni, Mademoiselle Gosselin, and Amalia Brugnoli.

Once dancing en pointe became popular, a more structured shoe had to be found. By the 1800s, the soft shoe filled with cotton and reinforced by stitching was replaced by increasingly stronger models. The use of stronger materials like leather, allowed for a more structured sole and fitted, structured toe coverings. Soon, companies began to make pointe shoes out of layers of fabric, boards and paste, a combination that is still in use today.

Pointe Shoes Today

Today, there are many brands of pointe shoes, however there are two primary designs for pointe shoes. One is the traditional paste shoe, made from layers of fabric, board, and leather glued tightly together and covered with layer of satin fabric. This is still the primary form of pointe shoe used, and most frequently produced by manufacturers including Bloch, Freed of London, Suffolk, and Grishko.

The second form of pointe shoe includes modern materials such as plastic to reinforce the shoe. The first manufacture of such shoes was from the Gaynor Minden company, patented by Eliza Minden in 1993. Elements of this shoe that differ from the traditional paste pointe shoes include the lack of pleats in the satin covering, layers of foam and gel liners for the inside of the shoe, and a supportive sole of new blended plastic materials that lasts much longer than soles on paste shoes.

Dangers of Pointe Shoes

Some things often taken for granted are the difficulty and dangers posed by pointe shoes. In the early 20th Century, young children would wear pointe shoes and prance about as a part of the vaudeville or acrobatic acts; however, we have since learned that pointe can be harmful to young children. This is because the anatomy of the feet is not designed to bear weight in the way the pointe shoe demands; when a dancer is balancing on one foot en pointe, the entirety of her body weight is being put upon the foot and ankle bones, focused on the tip of the pointe shoe, which can be less than two square inches in area. If the bones of the foot have not completed the majority of their ossification (the way in which bones harden), the pressure of the body weight can cause damage to the bones, which harms the development of the feet.

It is for this reason that most reputable dance studios choose to wait until a student is in their early teens to begin their studies in pointe shoes. Additionally, pointe shoe manufacturers have increased the number of size variables (including the length and width of the foot, and the length of the toes), allowing for shoes to be closely fitted to each dancer's feet, reducing the likelihood of damage to the foot.

Sources

Listed below are the sources used for this article, and are recommended for those who wish to learn more about this subject.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Ballet. Second Edition.

Author: Horst Koegler. Publisher: Oxford University Press.

Time and the Dancing Image.

Author: Deborah Jowitt. Publisher: University of California Press.

The official website of Gaynor Minden.

Janet Parke's online article, "To The Pointe".

Sarah Bezek - My name is Sarah, and I am a Senior at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am training to be a dance teacher, and hope to ...