In our Dear Katie series, Miami City Ballet soloist Kathryn Morgan answers your pressing dance questions. Have something you want to ask Katie? Email dearkatie@dancespirit.com for a chance to be featured! Dear Katie, I can do fouetté turns forever in flat shoes— but once I put my pointe shoes on, everything falls apart. How can […]
On the morning of May 1, Miriam Barbosa posted a photo of her daughter, Itzkan, on Facebook. The image itself is striking—Itzkan stands smiling on pointe in front of Miami City Ballet, where she has spent the last year as a pre-professional student, perched atop a mountain of old pointe shoes of all different sizes. […]
Few things ruin the magic of a performance faster than the sound of loud pointe shoes. “When an audience watches someone dancing, they don’t want to hear tap-tap-tap,” says Houston Ballet first soloist Allison Miller. Pointe shoe sounds can be distracting to you, too, breaking your concentration and keeping you from getting lost in the […]
In our “Dear Katie” series, MCB soloist Kathryn Morgan answers your pressing dance questions. Have something you want to ask Katie? Email dearkatie@dancespirit.com for a chance to be featured! Dear Katie, I’m 14 and have been studying ballet seriously for about three years. Even though I feel ready, my teachers haven’t put me on pointe […]
It’s the rite of passage every young ballerina dreams of: getting her first pair of pointe shoes. But it’s important to remember that a lot (and we mean a lot) of hard work and technique-honing leads up to this moment—not to mention getting the green light from your teacher. Dance Spirit turned to Jenna Lavin, […]
For professional ballet dancers, the search for the perfect pointe shoe is a lifelong quest. Even the smallest adjustment in manufacturing can make the difference between a shoe that allows a ballerina to soar and a shoe that detracts from her dancing. So what goes into creating the perfect fit? A lot of hard work, […]
The mark of a truly skilled ballerina is her ability to make the pointe shoe look like a part of her body, an extension of her beautifully S-curved leg. It’s hard to believe the shoe was ever foreign to her, or that she ever had that awkward first time on pointe. We asked six professional […]
As ballet’s gender roles grow increasingly blurred, more men than ever are reaching new heights: the tips of their toes. It’s no longer just Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and the few pointe-clad male character parts, like in Cinderella or Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream. Some male dancers are starting to experiment with pointe […]