Foot Work: thoughts on inclusion, The Perfect Pair, and evolution

Feet. They are literally the most fundamental (as in fundament, as in foundation) part of the body when it comes to being an upright, bipedal great ape, such as we humans are. I am currently reading a book about the evolution of the homonins (that is, the apes that became enough different from chimpanzee ancestors to be classified as human ancestors), and the author talks a lot about feet, and how the bones of the feet are really important to paleontologists trying to determine if they're looking at an upright walking (or dancing on two legs) creature, or a knuckle-assisted walker, like a gorilla or chimp.

I am also in that all-too-familiar phase of the adult ballet student's life: the quest for the Right Shoe. Not the shoe that fits on the right foot, mind you, but the pointe shoe that perfectly conforms to the singularities of my feet, right and left.

Below is a fairly recent photo that I took in a brand-new, freshly sewn pair of Capezio Kylie point shoes, a make I came across in a local dance shop about two years ago (and immediately purchased all five pairs in my size that they had in stock). They are pretty good shoes -- they do not last particularly long, but they break in fairly quickly, mold to my arch, break in the right place, and rarely give me hotspots or blisters if I tape my little and big toe and wear just a minimal bit of anti-friction padding. I am personally quite uncomfortable with thicker toe pads such as are popular with many dancers. I don't know why, but I feel like my feet are muted or muffled when I wear them, and I can't really sense where the floor is.

Pointe shoes by Capezio, legwarmers by Pam

As you can see, I do not have the perfect feet for ballet, but that said, they do the trick, most of the time. I have been (back) on pointe for about 7 years now, and I've had some really good shoes, some bad shoes, and some total stinkers. Still, I'm constantly searching for That Perfect Pair. Recently, candidates who have auditioned for the role include the new, European Gaynor Mindens, some Mirella Advanced, and the newest thing from Russian Pointe, the "En L'Air -- Echappe" model. None of them really quite cut it, though with some adjustments I think any of them might work. I half-shanked the Mirellas (definitely an improvement) after first practicing on a pair of bargain-basket Fuzis. I was really nervous to cut the shanks on a pair of expensive shoes, and so I decided that a cheap pair would allow me to experiment with that, and also all the other weird things I've seen people do but been afraid to try. Of course, the fact that I had never worn un-altered Fuzis means that my experimental design is pretty flawed.

In tinkering with the Fuzis I took a leaf from Kathryn Morgan and took up some of the extra fabric in the heel pocket (it's tip #7 in this video) and I also pancaked them, just to see how that would look. They're kind of ugly, honestly, but I'm rather fond of them. Sadly, all these adaptations mean that they really didn't live that long, but perhaps that's the shoe, too. I've never used a Fuzi before, so I have no expectations about its longevity. If you do decide to buy Fuzis, definitely buy some pancake makeup for them. They are just about the ugliest color of pink satin ever made.

From Gaynor Minden: pointe shoe colors available

The pinkness of pointe shoes is really their whiteness, of course, or rather, the way that the whiteness of ballet has long been emblematized. I am a fairly light-skinned white person, but even I, in the summer, am a lot darker than pointe shoe pink, even when it's the yummy rose-gold of those Kylies. Over the past year or so, a lot of companies have at last begun to produce pointe shoes in skin tones other than "pink," a long-overdue acknowledgement of the reality that Black and Brown dancers exist. This is not my territory, so I won't expound, but I have to say, seeing skin-tone matched pointe shoes on dancers of color at the summer intensive this year was profoundly moving. Ballet has a long way to go to address its problematic relationship to race and racism, but this is a small structural change with enormous implications. Talking to some of my friends who have been coloring their shoes and tights for decades, the relief is enormous, but, as one of them pointed out, "I still have to special order my shoes, wait for weeks, and hope that the model I need actually comes in something other than pink." So, more foot work to do.

Building the strength of the ballet community through inclusivity is a lot like other kinds of strength building in dance: everyone has to do it,  it takes a lot of time and work, and you're never "done." And sometimes it takes facing your fears. I've been doing a bit more center work in pointe shoes of late -- one recent class involved a combination that went jete, temps leve en releve x7 right and left, jete, temps leve en releve x3 right and left, then jete, temps leve en releve x1 right and left, and even before the music started playing I was struggling with anxiety, or really fear, about whether I could do it without hurting myself. I could all too easily picture myself falling and breaking my supporting ankle. But I sternly reminded myself that I just had to visualize doing it, and I did it, after a fashion. I don't think it was particularly graceful, but no broken ankle, so. Releves on one foot in center will continue to be a challenge, but good preps at the barre will help: one thing I've noticed that the professionals who teach the artEmotion summer workshop classes always do is spend a lot of time working on the 3/4 pointe to full pointe movement, really strengthening the metatarsals and stabilizing the leg and ankle through the upper range of the movement. There are tons of great videos online to help with this.

Human feet evolved for upright walking (and running, and dancing). The great apes who were our forebears lived in forests, and had to be able to climb efficiently -- it was advantageous, from an evolutionary perspective, for them if their big toes splayed out and could be used to grasp against the sole of the foot, more like a hand.  Modern apes all have this same basic foot form. At some point, probably about 7 million years ago, some apes started spending a lot more time in grassy, open country, and their climbers' feet were no longer so useful. A straighter alignment of the big toe was an adaptation suited to long-distance walking, and bipedal walking is about 75% more energy efficient than walking on all fours as our great ape cousins tend to do. Although foot adaptations weren't the only things that made upright bipedalism the homonin norm, they were crucial. And so began the journey of a thousand steps...

What really fascinates me about the evolution of human feet is how beautifully it illustrates the fundamentally random character of genetic mutation, and the incredible force of natural selection. Not all human feet look alike, right? It's pretty safe therefore to assume that not every bipedal early hominin had identical looking feet. There was a general pattern, but some had longer toes, some shorter, some were flatter, and some had high arches (beginning about 3.5 million years ago, according to this article from Yale). "Good enough" is really the guiding principle of adaptive evolution, and Darwin never talked about "survival of the fittest," only "survival of the fit." Which leads me to believe that even if dancing classical ballet en pointe were a fundamental survival characteristic in humans, there would still be people with perfect ballet feet and other people with good enough feet.

Greek feet, bronze

You often hear people talking about the different general foot types in ballet as "Greek," "Egyptian," and "Peasant" (or "Giselle," if you want to be nice). Sometimes "Roman" and "Celtic" are added into the mix for... cultural diversity? Greek feet are so called because they resemble the feet of Greek classical and Hellenistic sculptures, with the second toe longer than the big toe. Although many will claim that this is because real ancient Greeks had real feet that looked like this, as an art historian I can assure you that this is almost never the case with classical Greek aesthetics. Everything, and I mean everything, about Greek sculpture, no matter how "real" it looks, is actually idealized (even if it's "ugly"). Greek philosophers emphasized the idea of proportion and commensurability, seeing in rational systems of proportion a glimpse of the divine. Thus, the "Greek foot" with its diamond-like footprint is really just a visualization of an idealized, geometrically proportional form. I'm pretty certain that ancient Greeks had a variety of foot shapes. That's just the way human populations are.

Big Egyptian Feet

The story is the same for the Egyptian foot -- in Egyptian art, the foot always conforms to the same pattern, with the big toe longest and the lesser toes sloping away. Like the Greeks, the Egyptians had strict, religiously significant ideas about beauty and proportion. Sculptors and other artists were taught to make proper representations of human and other forms, and deviation from the norm was a kind of heresy. That's why, when the rogue king Akhenaton came to power and imposed a new, monotheistic religion during the 18th Dynasty, the whole canon of representation also changed (the foot shape remained the same, but the toes got really long). In the weird gnosis of people who believe that foot shape is indicative or determinative of personality, it is held that the Egyptian foot denotes introversion, secrecy, and mystery. Could it be that these traits are associated in popular culture in the West with the mysteries of Ancient Egypt? Hmm... I haven't actually met anyone who buys into this crap, but I'm sure they're out there, or at least the Internet is sure they are.

"peasant"

Peasant feet (sigh) and Roman feet are pretty similar, in that they have toes of more even length, the difference being that Roman feet are a little more tapered down to the little toe, and peasant feet more square. I think the moniker "peasant" is a little rude -- perhaps it arises from the idea that peasants are plain, earthy folks who go barefoot a lot, and therefore have wider-appearing feet? IDK. The "Celtic" foot is basically the same as the peasant, but with a longer second toe. You will find all kinds of hooey out there on how your foot shape reveals your ethnic heritage, but let's be clear -- that's baloney. There is no scientific evidence for a correlation between foot shape and ethnicity. No matter the ethnicity, bigger, taller people tend to have larger feet (both width and length). Smaller, shorter people tend to have smaller feet. The variety of foot shapes is pretty much the same across populations, evidently (this is based on a short search of creditable sources online). Makes sense. 

I sort of feel like it's not helpful to classify feet this way, since there's so much coded judgment classist (and Eurocentric) bias in it. Doesn't ballet culture already do enough to make us feel worried and anxious about our bodies? What if we just called feet "tapered" (Egyptian), "rounded" (Greek), and "square" (peasant/Roman/Celtic) and then dealt with the individual peculiarities of each foot separately? Indulge me: let the foot be a metaphor for ballet as a whole. Isn't it better if we look at each dancer as an individual, with a whole array of characteristics (high extension, great adage, needs work on carriage, etc.) that could include things like height, skin tone, or gender, but aren't limited to or definitively constrained by such factors. Likewise, each foot is unique -- even on a single body, the left and right foot are subtly different, and dancers are often hyper aware of these differences. 

To conclude this rambling discussion about feet, I leave you with a video that I find at once nauseating and beautiful (disgust and attraction are forever bedfellows, and feet are certainly in the category of repellent/attractive, as any foot fetishist can tell you); Alessandra Ferri's feet are pretty much the Platonic ideal of ballet feet, and she is so lyrical. Sting plays the guitar beautifully. But his "I'm a yogi" vibe is just so extra. One should wear one's yoga practice lightly and humbly, or it isn't really yoga, but that's a rant for another time. Enjoy!