There is nothing inside a pointe shoe
No spring, no plastic, no support of any kind. The block that lets a dancer stand on the tips of her toes is layers of fabric, paper and glue, hardened and then shaped by the dancer herself — banging it in a door frame, bending the shank, darning the tip, sometimes soaking it. Every pair is customised before it is worn.
They also die quickly. A professional may get one performance out of a pair, and a company can go through thousands in a season. Marie TAGLIONI is generally credited with the first sustained dancing on pointe, in *La Sylphide* in 1832, when the technique was so novel that audiences assumed wires were involved. Her shoes were soft satin and she was essentially doing it on strength alone.
A defection in an airport departure lounge
In June 1961 the Kirov Ballet was at Le Bourget airport in Paris, about to fly to London. Rudolf NUREYEV was told he was being sent back to Moscow instead, supposedly to dance at a special event, and understood immediately what it meant.
He had a few minutes in a crowded lounge with his minders on either side. He walked to two French police officers and said he wanted to stay. It took the police a moment to grasp what was being asked while the Soviet officials tried to pull him back. He became the first Soviet artist to defect during the Cold War, and went on to partner Margot FONTEYN, nineteen years his senior, in one of the most celebrated stage partnerships of the century. Mikhail BARYSHNIKOV and Natalia MAKAROVA both did the same thing later.
Backwards and in high heels
The line about Ginger ROGERS doing everything Fred ASTAIRE did, only backwards and in high heels, is quoted constantly and almost never credited. It was written by the cartoonist Bob Thaves in his *Frank and Ernest* strip in 1982 — a single panel, two men looking at a poster.
It is also accurate. Rogers was acting, singing and dancing a partner's steps in reverse while wearing shoes designed for standing in, and in at least one take her feet bled through the satin. Astaire's own working method was the other half of the story: he rehearsed a routine for weeks and insisted it be filmed head to toe in long unbroken takes, so the audience could see there was no edit doing the hard part.
Inventing a way to move
Some of the names here did not just dance well; they built techniques other people now learn. Martha GRAHAM constructed an entire vocabulary out of the contraction and release of the torso with the breath, made around 180 works, and performed into her seventies. Merce CUNNINGHAM separated dance from music so the two merely happened at the same time. Pina BAUSCH put speech, water and earth on stage and called the result dance theatre.
The grid runs from TAGLIONI and CERRITO in the 1840s through PAVLOVA, NIJINSKY, MARKOVA and BALANCHINE to Alvin AILEY, Gregory HINES, Carlos ACOSTA, Matthew BOURNE — who staged *Swan Lake* with male swans — and Misty COPELAND, who in 2015 became the first Black woman promoted to principal at American Ballet Theatre, seventy-five years after the company was founded. Isadora DUNCAN threw out the shoes altogether. Much of it is danced to the classical repertoire, and quite a lot of that music was written to order.