This weekend my 12-year-old niece came to visit me. She is taking ballet classes, among other kinds of activities, and she has not yet begun classes on pointe. Often pointe training begins with 15-20 minutes of work at the end of a ballet class so that your muscles are warm. She hopes that she’ll be able to start pointe work next year, if her teachers and parents approve.
For this visit my niece expressed the desire to try on a pair of pointe shoes, and with the help of a colleague who is married to a Louisville ballet dancer, I was able to secure an old pair for her. I showed my niece how to protect her toes with lambswool, how to navigate the elastics and tie the ribbons around her ankles, and how to tuck the knots into the soft place between her ankle bones and her Achilles tendons. I showed her how to roll up carefully from relevé (demi-pointe) onto full pointe and then through her feet down again into first position. She did this while holding onto the back of a chair with both hands.
My niece was surprised that going onto full pointe hurt and that her toes felt jammed and squished into the shoes. And yet she was thrilled by the sense of a rite of passage – a sense of having been given access to something that was for older girls and for professional ballerinas.
My brother, my niece’s father, told me later that he wondered about the safety of pointe classes at the school where my niece is learning ballet. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that pointe shoes, anywhere, anytime, make much sense in terms of “safety.”
Pointe shoes put one’s feet into a position for which human feet are not well-designed. One of the hallmarks of former dancers who spent years in pointe shoes is that we often have feet that have been bruised and callused. Toes that are longer than the others are bent in the box of the shoe and the weight of one’s body are poured into a much smaller surface area than standing on one’s full foot allows. Some of us developed bunions from pointe shoes. Others experienced metatarsal injuries, along with tendonitis of various kinds.
It’s a bit odd to acknowledge the barbarous effects of pointe shoes on one’s feet while at the same time being able to see how beautiful pointe work is due to the way that it elongates the lines of ballet through elongating one’s legs. How can something that is physically harmful be psychologically empowering? It seems like a conflict where health ought to be declared the victor, given that in many other spheres of life health is a primary value.
And yet. On pointe, elevated to the tallest one can be while still touching the ground, one’s eye level higher, one’s legs and abdomen taut, the top of one’s head reaching towards the ceiling, there is a feeling of strength and of power. There is a feeling of being able to control rising, and falling, and precariousness, and safety. I get the appeal for a young woman who has begun the road to adulthood. She wants to try her own hand (or foot) at beautiful and dangerous challenges. To try, to endure, to conquer, and to master. To master one’s own body, one’s own fear, the studio, the stage, and the world.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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