How To Break In Your Shoes Like a Ballerina

I arrived at Hannah Clark’s Bronte apartment with a hammer, stanley knife, and three different kinds of pliers, as instructed. The former ballerina with the Brisbane Ballet Company had her dance box waiting on the living room floor, contents splayed across the floral knit rug – a dishevelled clothing trail in pastel cotton, spandex and knit. 

Pointe shoes, in various states of busted, lay limp and fleshy, filthy ribbons trailing like sodden tapeworms. Dental floss and scissors completed the tableau. 

The beauty of ballet is produced through blood, sweat, tears and pain. The beauty of pointe  is produced through ripping, stitching, cutting, scoring, hammering and beating princess shoes on cement with unrelenting force until their woody thuds muffle, and finally go quiet. 

Each shoe is handmade, built on years of painstaking craftsmanship by “the makers” – shoemakers; near-mythical creatures who to Clark may as well inhabit another universe – only to be destroyed. The standardised pieces are useless without personalisation. Figuring out what works for your feet is “your life’s work”.

“For each pair of shoes, it can take one to three hours,” Clark said. “Depending how much I care about the shoe that day.”

“I wouldn’t want anyone else to sew my shoes. It would impact my performance. The specificity… even just sewing the ribbons would change the whole feel of the shoe. You want it to be a second skin.”

The shoes come identical. No left, no right, just pretty little things to be bent to the dancer’s will. With a fresh pair on, Clark balanced up on pointe to decide which would be which, based on “what felt right”, and marked each with a pen. 

The vamp – inner sole – was ripped off of the base of the shoe. Clark used her teeth. The freshly-ripped flap was then chopped off at the arch point. The pin that held the sole to the vamp was pulled out with pliers. The toe box was beaten with a hammer. The arch area of the outer soles would either be glued with shellac – crushed up bug shells – or something called “jet glue”, which Clark said burns holes in clothing but reinforces the sole. 

The circumference of the toe box is sewn, to help with balance. This can take hours. Clark said she preferred dental floss to thread – “cost effective and it doesn’t break”. The satin is sliced and ripped off the top of the shoe to help prevent slippage.

Ribbons and elastic are then sewn on. Sometimes, shoes are dyed with tea to dull the glimmering satin, or better match the dancer’s skin tone.

The bottoms of the shoes are scored meat-like with a stanley knife. Dancers dip the beaten shoes in rosin, a sticky tree sap that violinists use on their bows, which helps prevent slippage.

“There’s nothing worse than a slippery stage,” Clark said, as she stabbed the shoes viciously. “The stage was so slippery once, they put Coke all over it, mopped it with Coke.”

In order to be used, pointe shoes must be destroyed. After all of the work, between maker and dancer, they survive just a few wears. Clark mentioned her favourite pair, which she used a record eleven times. 

When they are retired, pointe shoes are gifted to baby ballerinas, or thrown in the dance school’s “shoe box” for their materials to be repurposed. 

The elastics and ribbons are torn out and used by the ballerina again and again. 

“These ones have blood on them,” Clark declared, holding up an old pair by its ribbons, its faded red patina vaguely visible against the pink satin. The shoes, worn and frayed, dangled like limbs, shimmering in the morning light.

Arielle Richards is the multimedia reporter at VICE Australia, follow her on Instagram and Twitter.