Are you anticipating the approaching Christmas and thinking about an original present from Russia? 🙂
Ballet shoes are the most critical working tool used by a dancer during a performance. Pointe shoes are a type of ballet shoe especially hand crafted for a ballerina, by her own shoemaker, to enable her to dance on the tips of her toes. Every young ballerina dreams of the day she can one day change into pointe shoes and dance on her toes. Many years of sweat and tears go into preparing a young dancer for this stimulating stage in her dancing career.
The shoes look delicate but whilst elegant and graceful, they are extremely tough. The tip of the shoe is a rigid box made of densely compressed fabric and board hardened with glue. The ballerina relies on it to be very strong as perhaps 2 square centimetres support her entire weight. The rest of the shoe is careful shaped by the shoemaker from cotton, leather and satin. Each shoe is bespoke to the dancer and no two pairs are the same.
The pointe shoes enable the ballerina to create an ethereal sense of magic and lightness giving the illusion that she is floating on the stage.
Maria Taglioni, the renowned Italian ballerina who performed in the Romantic era, is credited as the first ballerina to dance ‘on pointe’ in the 19th Century. Taglioni and her peers of the era wore starch stuffedballet shoes until the Italian cobblers caught on making harder shoesreinforced with hemp and paper. These prototypes evolved into the shoe we see today.
There is now the unique opportunity to buy original “hand-made in Russia” ‘pointe shoes’ as worn by ballerina’s in the top Ballet troupes in Moscow and St Petersburg. The shoes are brand-new and unworn. They are a premium product and limited in availability. The exquisite Bolshoi Pointe shoes are available in traditional pink but also offered in some unorthodox colours like (red, green, turquois, purple or golden), available in limited numbers. They will make a wonderful gift for any aficionado of the Russian ballet.