I didn’t last very long on pointe. I got my first pair of pointe shoes when I was thirteen, which is a little late - most girls get them at 11 or 12 - but that’s when my teacher, and the physical therapist she brought in to examine all her students, said I was ready. And I gave up on pointe by the time I turned 15. I’ve always had a hard time sticking with something that I’m not instantly good at, and no one is instantly good at pointe.
That’s partly because once you strap on a pair of pointe shoes, you basically have to relearn ballet from scratch. Imagine getting really good at playing soccer, training at it starting at age 6, and then, when you turn twelve, someone takes away your cleats and puts a pair of platform heels on your feet and says: “OK, kid, get out there and play.” Pointe shoes are kind of like that.
Everything changes. Your center of gravity is all off. Your feet are made longer, and the shoes, which are much heavier than your old soft canvas slippers, make them less mobile. Just when you’ve escaped the tedium of endless tendus and started to really feel like you’re dancing, it’s back to square one. Back to endless tiny, repetitive movements so you can relearn how to use your feet.
And you’re so LOUD. The toe end of a pointe shoe, which is called the box, is a layer cake of glue and fabric, and sometimes newspaper, and when it’s new and unbroken-in, it clacks on the floor in a way that ballet slippers definitely don’t. It’s kind of like dancing with your feet in empty tissue boxes that are also expensive and cause blisters.
They cause more serious injuries, too.
Most ballet injuries, as I’ve been learning this week, happen in the foot and ankle. Depending on which study you read, foot and ankle injuries account for between 34% and 62% per 100 dance injuries, with female ballet dancers being especially vulnerable in those places. And that’s in large part thanks to pointe work.
I spent much of the last week talking to PTs who treat dancers, and knee-deep in sports medicine journal articles about what pointe shoes do to the feet. The answer is: nothing good.
One PT explained it to me like this: the pointe shoe basically asks the joint of the big toe (aka the hallux) to bear weight the way the knee joint does when you’re standing on a straight leg. When you’re on pointe, all your weight is directed down through the locked toe joint (PTs call this position plantar flexion). Except that that’s not what the the hallux is designed to do. It’s not designed to lock, it’s meant to move around, like it does when you’re walking and your weight is transferred in a sequence from the heel to the ball and then through the toes. And, of course, the joint where the big toe meets the foot is MUCH smaller than your knee joint. The pounds per square inch that press onto that small joint when you stand on pointe are well beyond what that joint is designed to endure.
Here’s the thing, though: dancing without pointe shoes isn’t a whole lot better, it just puts the pressure on a different part of the foot. In one study, 63% of dancers reported stress fractures just one toe over from the hallux, in the second metatarsal (the big toe connects to the first metatarsal). “It is the longest metatarsal,” the authors explain,” and thus bears the bulk of the weight in the demipointe position.”
So even if you’re not dancing in pointe shoes, you’re putting your feet through a lot. You know that ache you feel when you get out of bed the morning after a night spent in high heels? That’s probably your second metatarsal talking. Humans aren’t designed to spend hours at a time on demipointe (or in Manolos).
I didn’t spend that much of my life on pointe and I didn’t sustain any pointe-related injuries. My toes haven’t been stress fractured multiple times. I never suffered a “dancer’s fracture” in my ankle, which is what doctors have come to call oblique spiral shaft fractures, or “dancer’s tendonitis,” which is what they’ve come to call flexor hallucis longus in the calf. I don’t have arthritis in my ankles and feet, or unsightly bunions. I got off easy with a few blisters.
I gave up quickly on something I wasn’t instantly good at. And this is one of the few times I’m glad of it.
That’s it from me. Thanks for reading.