Demi Goddesses (and two Demi Gods)

 

iconic sylphyness

Dazzling feats of pointe work are, without a doubt, one of the aesthetic pleasures of watching ballet. Charles-Louis Didelot, the early-nineteenth-century French dance master of the Russian Imperial Theaters in Saint Petersburg knew how to wow an audience – in 1815, he deployed his new “flying machine” (a kind of wire and pulley trapeze system) to hoist ballerina Geneviève-Adélaïde Gosselin up on her tippity toes in a performance of his ballet, Flore et Zephyr. Now, Mlle. Gosselin had already been experimenting with reinforcing the toes of her ballet slippers to rise past demi-pointe, so while Didelot (a man) commonly gets the credit for “inventing” pointe work, in all likelihood it was actually amongst the ranks of female dancers competing for the newfound celebrity afforded ballerinas who pushed ballet in the direction of dancing en pointe. At first it must have been just a breathtaking stunt, but in 1832, when Filippo Taglioni choreographed the ballet La Sylphide for his daughter, Marie, it became part of the visual repertoire of ballet denoting the Romantic-era ballerina’s light, sylph-like essence.

Much ink has been spilled about pointe work and the history of the pointe shoe; a Google Scholar search of the term “ballet” and the term “pointe” together yields over 30,000 results. Many of these are from physical therapy and medical journals, which perhaps suggests something, but there are also a healthy (if you want to call it that) number of scholarly works dedicated to the “phallic symbolism” and other metaphorical and semiotic implications of ballet’s longstanding gender divide around the pointe shoe. It’s all very interesting, all the more so in 2023, when the idea that a man might dance en pointe and do it seriously (as opposed to satirically) has taken root. I mean, why not ? (Well, because they’re not trained to it, and this could be dangerous for them, but on the other hand, if we did train boys on pointe, then it would probably be safer.)

As my title for this entry suggest, however, I’m not really wanting to think about pointe shoes. It’s bad enough that at fifty plus years old I still put them on my poor feet several times a week. So let’s talk instead about dancing without pointe shoes.

I’m teaching adult beginner ballet this fall with a bunch of women and two guys, and I’m really taking them down to the brass tacks, using a curriculum I adapted from a couple of different sources I found online that are specifically concerned with the training of adults starting ballet. One theme for the class is feet – how to articulate them, shape them, use them to maximum effect, and keep them healthy. The killer exercise we did in week one, and will come back to throughout the semester, is one I remember from my RAD days – slowly rising to quarter, half, and three-quarter pointe and then equally slowly lowering back down. It’s a brute, and also a bit boring, but adults are fully capable of recognizing what it’s doing in their bodies. The calves begin to burn, the arches feel it, and if you’re not holding your core, you wobble all over the place. 

I have a persistent joint problem in the big-toe metatarsal of my left foot, and sometimes it really squawks at me as I lower from three-quarter to half pointe, which in this context serves to remind me that this is not a particularly comfortable or habitual way in which most people move their bodies. We wear firm-soled shoes that cradle and cushion our feet, reducing the amount of finer adjustments and movements that they make all day long, so the muscles get atrophied. Twenty-first century footwear is the equivalent of the office chair – it is ruining our bodies’ range of motion and balance of strength!

The other footwork we’ve been doing is moving (all of this in first position, btw) from standing on two feet to one foot, with the working leg going to sur le cou de pied. While a big point of this exercise is feeling the turnout turn on (you literally cannot do slcdp without fully engaging the turnout muscles in the underbutt and pelvis), it’s also amazing how well it embeds the proprioceptive identity of the properly shaped foot. Since you cannot sickle when in this position, and since the structure of the standing leg gives tactile feedback to the sole of the working foot, it “trains” the mind-body connection to go “oh, that’s how my foot is supposed to be shaped"). I also pointed out to them last night that if you turn sideways to the mirror with your working foot towards the mirror, you can see that despite the fact it feels, at first, as if you’re really winging your foot back in this position (that is, contracting the muscles on the outer side of the ankle disproportionately while extending those on the inside), the inner anklebone and the big toe are almost perfectly aligned with the shin and the knee. That’s why it makes such a pretty line – a gentle, relatively flat curve, no kinks.

If you take that “wrapped” foot away from the supporting let and rest the tip of the longest toe on the floor, then flex the toes, the foot is positioned exactly how it ought to be for optimal placement in demi-pointe. Or, if you just stretch the knee to the extended position to the second, without changing anything else, you have a perfectly placed tendu. It was fun to watch them experiment with this, and then have the lightbulb visibly go on in their bodies and minds. After we did that, I really noticed that all of them, even those with very limited ankle movement, were pointing their feet, and not sickling!

Yay for demi-pointe and the old soft-shoe!