Pointe shoe
Women began to dance ballet in 1681, twenty years after King Louis XIV of France ordered the founding of the Académie Royale de Danse.
[8] This lightness and ethereal quality was well received by audiences and, as a result, choreographers began to look for ways to incorporate more pointe work into their pieces.
[11][12] The birth of the modern pointe shoe is often attributed to the early 20th-century Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who was one of the most famous and influential dancers of her time.
Pavlova had particularly high, arched insteps, which left her vulnerable to injury when dancing en pointe.
To compensate for this, she inserted toughened leather soles into her shoes for extra support and flattened and hardened the toe area to form a box.
[13] Examples of this include Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, and characters such as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the evil stepsisters in Cinderella.
[8] Pointe shoes employ structural reinforcements in both shank and toe box in an attempt to distribute the dancer's weight load throughout the feet, thus reducing the load on the toes enough to enable the dancer to support all their body weight on fully vertical feet.
[14] Every dancer has unique feet, with variations that include toe length and shape, arch flexibility, and mechanical strength.
The box is a rigid enclosure within the front end of the shoe that encases and supports the dancer's toes.
In conventional pointe shoes, the box is typically made from tightly packed layers of paper, paste and fabric that have been glued together and then shaped into an enclosure.
A number of shape attributes, including box length, height, taper angle and platform area, determine the suitability of a shoe for any particular foot.
A shank's thickness may be consistent throughout or it may vary along its length to produce different strengths at select points.
The two ribbons wrap around the dancer's ankle in opposite directions, overlapping one another so as to form a cross at the front.
The elastic band—which traverses the front of the ankle below the ribbons—keeps the heel of the shoe in place against the foot when the dancer is en pointe.
Typically, the loose ends of newly sewn ribbons are briefly exposed to open flames to melt them and thus prevent fraying.
The toe box allows the dancer to experience the feel of a pointe shoe, while the insole and outsole work together to provide the resistance needed for developing foot and ankle strength.
Dancers typically "break in" new pointe shoes to reduce or eliminate the discomfort they commonly cause.
Several devices are commonly used to mitigate the discomfort:[20] In the course of normal use, there are three predominant types of wear on a pointe shoe that will determine its useful lifetime.
As the body of the shoe is repetitively flexed, the shank gradually weakens and loses its ability to provide support.
In pointe work the front face and bottom edge of the toe box are subjected to friction against the performance surface.
Due to its unprofessional appearance, however, damaged fabric may render the shoe unfit to wear in situations other than informal practice or rehearsal.
Under moderate usage, a pair of pointe shoes will typically last through ten to twenty hours of wear.
