Cinderella as a pointe shoe fetish ballet

Cinderella’s Prince savoring the feel and scent of a sweaty pointe shoe in situ

Cinderella a version lost to history: One of the most popular versions of Cinderella was written by Charles Perrault in 1697. However, a mid 19th century version now lost in the mists of time was apparently the first to include the evolving blocked ballet shoe that was morphing into the modern pointe as an important element in the story.

This version of the fairy tale Cinderella, now lost except for the choreographers notebook in La Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, deviates considerably from Perrault’s story and is set in late 19th century Germany and tells of a young German Nobleman just reaching his majority as hereditary heir of a Principality in what is now southern Germany. He was too far from the twin centers of ballet shoe fetishism; Paris and St. Petersburg, to travel there frequently so he vowed to feed and cultivate his growing toe-shoe fetish by establishing a local ballet school with retired dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet whose roots go back to the Court of Louis the XIV in 1661 and the Mariinsky Ballet founded in the 1740s, as teachers for his students.

The student selection process was rigorous, but he managed to recruit a small group of established ballet students from the daughters of the local aristocracy as well as set up beginners dance classes for girls 5 y/o and older until in a few years of unrelenting training and discipline he had a small but accomplished ballet school in which the oldest girls in their mid to late teens were wearing toe-shoes of the most advanced design. And, he had a cobbler shop set up for the sole purpose of providing satin and leather ballet shoes for the students and dancers of his company.

One day on his solitary morning walk to inspect the students at his ballet school the Prince came upon a single ballet shoe lying in the dust of the road. He picked it up and inspected it closely marveling at the tiny, tight, neat rows of stitching the held the ribbons on the shoe thinking the needlework was that of a nimble orderly mind dedicated to her art. Slipping his nose into the heavily stitched block of the shoe he took a deep breath and was entranced by the bouquet of the woman’s scent. It was a mixture of estrogenic sweat, damp leather, paste and fabric and he fancied the shoe still warm with her body heat that had made the block so soft and pliable that he wondered how a woman could dance on her toes in such soft shoes. He immediately became amorously aroused and determined to find the owner and return her shoe.

He hurried on to the school and had all the students and female staff appear before him one at a time trying to find the shoe’s owner, but to no avail and so he asked the Ballet Master to call the roll to see who was missing. The only absent dancer was one of the young French ballerinas, a beloved teacher at the school and who that morning had rushed home suddenly shortly after arriving. And so it was that the Prince appeared at the door of dancer’s thatched cottage at the end of the village. He asked to see the dancer, but her maid said she was indisposed. He insisted and was admitted by her maid who again said her mistress was unwell and wasn’t receiving visitors and he again insisted that she appear before him. So after some time she appeared before him with ashes on her clothes looking pale and unwell and when he asked after her health she blushed and bowed her head and didn’t reply.

Taking her chin in his hand he gently raised her head and in his most gentle and persuasive voice asked her to sit down and please tell him what was wrong so he could make it right. She immediately smiled and blushing apologized for her appearance and said she had been about to light the fireplace in her room to warm herself when a log fell off the grate and covered her with ashes. She said there was nothing he could do since her time of the month had arrived a day early and she was bleeding. She said she expected to be fine by evening as her cramps normally lasted only a few hours at the beginning of her flow.

He understood immediately and was certain the shoe belonged to her, but it was necessary to test his certainty because he intended to make the owner of the shoe an offer she couldn’t refuse. And so he knelt before her and withdrew the shoe from a pocket of his jacket, unfolded its soft satin back and after asking her to extend her left leg and point her foot he slipped the shoe onto her foot and pulled the back over her heel. It fit perfectly! Not one to waste time, while he was kneeling he asked her to marry him and she immediately agreed since she had been in love with him for months because of his kindness to the students of the school and his skills at hunting and diplomacy which she had learned about from traveling minstrels before she arrived in the village to accept a position as a ballet teacher. She thanked him for returning her shoe as the specially blocked shoes were very expensive and took a lot of time to adapt to fit her feet and she showed him her monogram she had embroidered on the inside of the fabric quarter panel of the shoe just to establish her ownership.

The Nutcracker: Prince Freud wrote the story-lines for a series of other ballets that all had the use of toe-shoes for seduction, defense or as offensive weapons and as objects of veneration on or off the feet of the heroines in his stories. And this was at least ten years ahead of the first use of the pointe shoe as a weapon in a mainstream ballet, The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker, a ballet in two acts, music by Tchaikovsky with choreography by Lev Ivanov was first presented at the Maryinsky in December 1892 and in it the child heroine, Clara, contributes to the defeat of the Mouse King by hitting him in the head with the block of her pointe shoe which saved the life of the Nutcracker Prince and earns her his love and adoration in return.

Prince Freud had three daughters by the French ballerina he married and they were all raised and trained by their mother to use their expertise in musicality, technique and stamina in the art of ballet dancing to cloud the minds of the males pursuing them until they so besotted the men of their choice that they got almost everything they wanted and lived happily ever after. By then the process of vulcanizing rubber had been perfected and cervical caps had become effective and the favorite means of contraception in Europe. If carefully fitted and used consistently the cervical cap was extremely effective in preventing pregnancy so the Princesses could plan their families. The daughters married into the nobility of the surrounding countries and in that manner the fetish of the pointe shoe was spread and nurtured throughout the ruling class of Europe.

Male children were tutored in the ballet shoe fetish as part of their earliest education so almost all would seek out Ballerinas as mistresses, consorts and wives in order to support their pointe shoe fetish which in many cases rose to the level of addiction. Even young European nobles sent to be educated in the monastic universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England which were then infamous as hotbeds of repressed sexuality and homosexual Dons could not be swayed from their quest for ballet girls and insisted on the girls wearing their ballet shoes during sex. However, the pattern was broken during the First World War (1914-1918) as nearly an entire generation of the male European elite was slaughtered on the battlefields of Europe and the pointe shoe fetish as a driving force in the lives of the male nobility almost died out.

Cinderella: And then, at the end of the Second World War (1939-1945) a Russian composer and his choreographer produced their version of the story of Cinderella as a ballet in which the pointe shoe became an object of veneration. Cinderella is a ballet in three acts with music by Sergei Prokofiev and choreography by Rotislav Zakharov and was first performed by the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow in November 1945. This ballet was the first in the 20th century to use the pointe shoe as a public object of veneration by substituting it for the glass slipper in the fairy tale and by doing so they rekindled the flames of the pointe shoe fetish and worship in Europe.

Reawakened by the ballet the pointe shoe fetish grew in the mainstream of social life under the noses of one of the most repressive and brutal regimes seen in modern times. Ever since Cinderella was first performed the adoration and seduction of the pointe shoe has simmered and bubbled beneath the surface. Slim girls lovely in satin shoes that make their long gorgeous legs look even more beautiful when balanced on their toes. Over the years Cinderella has contributed to the mystique of all the women who have ever danced in pointe shoes. Of necessity in 1945 the fetish was cloaked in the gauzy mists of feminine beauty, skill and artistic temperament, but the rush to smell and own a dancer’s sweaty pointes was on in earnest in Europe once again.

Natalia Makarova and La Bayadère

Mariinsky Ballet La Bayadère Alina Somova as Nikiya in Act 2 scene 5 ‘the Kingdom of the Shades’

The New York Times
Dance
May 10, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

The Eternal Godmother of ‘La Bayadère’

ONE by one, clad in diaphanous white, they enter to a flowing adagio musical phrase. One arm is stretched forward toward infinity, one leg stretched back to create a glorious arabesque line; then each ghostly figure arches backward, arms framing the head like a halo. The phrase is repeated over and over, the line of dancers winding across the stage in seemingly never-ending serpentine progression: a poetic image of eternity, of order, symmetry, harmony, of classical ballet itself.

This famous sequence is the opening of the Shades scene in “La Bayadère,” originally choreographed in 1877 by Marius Petipa for the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg. The ballet — a tale of a young Indian temple dancer, or bayadère, betrayed by her warrior lover and poisoned by her rival —was an immediate hit. Through various stagings and revisions, it remained a Russian repertory staple over the next century, as familiar to audiences and dancers as “Swan Lake” or “Giselle.”

When American Ballet Theater gets its Metropolitan Opera House season under way with “Bayadère” on Tuesday night, the audience might well feel the same way; the ballet (and a one-act version, “The Kingdom of the Shades”) is danced by so many major ballet companies that it has become part of the pantheon of 19th-century works that, for many, define an idea of classical dance.

In fact it has been just 30 years — almost to the day on Tuesday — that the full-length “Bayadère” was seen for the first time in the West. It was staged for Ballet Theater by Natalia Makarova, the great Russian ballerina who defected to the West in 1970. Like Rudolf Nureyev before her, she brought not just her inimitable dancing but also a heritage: a trove of knowledge of the classics that she had danced throughout her Kirov career.

Remarkably, since Ms. Makarova’s sole experience of staging was setting the “Shades” act for Ballet Theater in 1974, she mounted the elaborate production for Ballet Theater, where she was a principal dancer, almost single-handedly.

On the opening night she danced the main role of the bayadère Nikiya for the first time, with the British dancer Antony Dowell as Solor, the warrior who loves her but is compelled to marry the Rajah’s daughter Gamzatti.

“When I was dancing in Russia, I never prepared for this,” Ms. Makarova said this month after rehearsals at Ballet Theater’s studios near Union Square.

“But I had come to America, I was dancing all these modern works with Ballet Theater, and I looked at the company, at the people, that eclectic repertoire. At that time dancers didn’t know the differences in port de bras, épaulement, the right line, using the whole body in harmony. I had a desire to give to them what I know.”

Ms. Makarova, has lost none of her stringency about that heritage over 30 years of Bayadère rehearsals. (Her version is by far the most popular, with 14 productions worldwide, including the Royal Ballet, the Ballet de Santiago, the Australian Ballet and the Tokyo Ballet. But there are others, including Rudolf Nureyev’s lavish 1992 production for the Paris Opera Ballet and stagings by Vladimir Malakhov, Patrice Bart, Florence Clerc and Stanton Welch.)

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head during a rehearsal of the corps dancers, as they began a phrase for the umpteenth time. “Don’t like.” The pianist stopped abruptly, the dancers slumped, looking weary. Ms. Makarova walked over to the first row. “You are doing too much,” she said, imitating an overly lifted chin as she framed her head with circled arms. “It should be spiritual, not emotional.”

They tried the phrase again. “Better,” she said. “But not good yet.”

As the dancers filed out, she explained: “I don’t want to be too hard on them. They have just come back from a week’s break.”

Later Ms. Makarova, who at 69 still looks every inch the ballerina (and who casually lifted her leg above her shoulder while demonstrating in rehearsal), recalled how hard it had been to teach the dancers the nuances of the style she wanted. “We really started from the beginning,” she said. “How to hold a finger. It wasn’t a technical issue, but one of expressiveness. It was a revelation for them, the moment they got it. Of course there was a lot of emotion, because I demand a lot.”

Cynthia Harvey, who danced Gamzatti at the premiere, remembers Ms. Makarova as a tough, but inspiring coach.

“There were times when I wanted to burst into tears, but I understood that this was an education of a whole new kind,” she said, speaking from her home near Norwich, England. “How she used point work was a revelation to me, the way she rolled through her feet both up and down. How you carry your arms, where the head goes. It was a whole other level of refinement that isn’t even necessarily appreciated today.”

Ms. Makarova based her “Bayadère” on the original Petipa production, which included a final act that showed the gods’ destruction of the temple as Solor and Gamzatti are married. The 1941 version that she had danced at the Kirov, staged by Vladimir Ponomaryov and Vakhtang Chabukiani, had omitted this scene, as had all post-Petipa stagings.

“From my point of view there was not enough logic and conclusion without the final scene,” she said. “There is a crime, and there must be punishment, dramatically it must work that way.”

Her research on the ballet was hampered, she said, by cold war politics; she managed “with great difficulty” to acquire the Minkus score (later arranged by John Lanchberry) and found reviews of the original ballet in the Sergeyev Collection at Harvard, which gave her an idea of the atmosphere of the Petipa era.

Ms. Makarova was no purist, however. She pared away a number of dances, moved the Bronze Idol solo (a post-Petipa interpolation) to the last act, and choreographed a new solo for Gamzatti, and a new scene for Solor, just before he sees the vision of the Shades.

“Sometimes those old war horses need adjustment,” said Mr. Dowell, in New York to rehearse the company last month. “Natasha’s version really works because of its economy — the scene changes, the way it moves. She used what she knew, but she was able to let go of the past too.”

“La Bayadère” was a huge popular success at its May 18, 1980, premiere. “La Bayadère,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Post, "is the culmination of Ballet Theater’s 40 year-old history.”

Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times that it was “a superspectacle in the grandest of grand opera house traditions.” She didn’t mean this in an entirely positive way. “This “Bayadère” sets ballet back by 70 years,” Ms. Kisselgoff commented later in the review.

Critics have continued to feel the same mixture of love and annoyance with “Bayadère”: “No matter which production of this full-length ballet you see, at least 60 percent of it is trash,” Alastair Macaulay wrote in The Times in 2008. “Alternately entertaining and pompous, invariably spectacular, generally formulaic, musically trite and (the setting is India) an anthropologist’s nightmare.”

Audiences apparently don’t care. And Ms. Makarova offers a spirited argument for why not.

“The story is Shakespearean,” she said. “About eternal things: love, jealousy, betrayal, retribution, the choice between love and duty. As humans, we are always interested in this.”