Red shoes their power and the gory, Summer Solstice

Well worn red Bloch Axiom pointe-shoes

The Photo: A pair of red Bloch Axiom (S0108) paste pointes worn to seduce a man into menstrual sex. A few dancers in my circle wear comfortably broken in red pointe shoes to let a partner know they are bleeding and to entice him into having menstrual sex.

Dancers wearing paste shoes and pointe fetishists know that paste shoes develop an entirely different bouquet of scents – damp satin, Hessian, leather and paste mixed with the wearer’s estrogenic sweat - when worn than do Gaynor Minden pointes made primarily of polymer and satin with just sueded soles and perhaps tips. Even as great a believer in the longer life and superior support of GM pointes as I am I have to admit that the bouquet of freshly worn and damp paste pointes is a more fragrant, erotic and popular scent among fetishists than the somewhat chemical scent of freshly worn and still sweat soaked Gaynors.

Red shoes: Red shoes once exclusively the footwear of royalty became more commonly worn and known in the 19^th century - when red dye became far less expensive - as a symbol of the demimonde. In the mid 20^th century red shoes became fashionable with conventional young women after films in which red shoes played a prominent part became popular. Two such films were The Wizard of Oz (1939) with Dorothy (Judy Garland) wearing magic red slippers and Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) wearing red pointe-shoes in the film The Red Shoes (1948) based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale of a disobedient girl cursed to dance forever in her new red shoes. Those films brought red shoes back as popular footwear with a touch of the wild and exotic and in some cases the erotic. Today red shoes are still a source of fascination, power and mystery to both their wearer and her beholders.

Red pointe-shoes still have immense appeal for young dancers many of whom see themselves as a modern Victoria Page intending to have it all, a career as a ballet dancer and as a wife to a loving husband. The power of the red shoes lies in their ability to reveal some fundamental truth about the wearer — and deliver a penalty, or prize accordingly.  

Red pointe-shoes and menstruation: Years of training to strengthen legs and feet as well as taped and padded toes allow a confident dancer in pointe-shoes to rise above the discomfort and seduce both herself and the object of her lust or perhaps affection. In my circle of ballet dancer friends red pointes worn during play indicate that the woman is on her period and is interested in menstrual sex.  The power, poise and pleasure radiated while internalizing the pain when red pointe shoes are worn by a beautiful, confident and seductive menstruating woman will allow her to take a normal healthy situation which society teaches should be concealed and use her gory secretions to enthrall a suitor in his ardor so she can lead him around on a psychological penis leash.

Menstruation among women knowledgeable about their bodies has for ages been a source of fascination, power and mystery; enabling women not on contraceptive hormones to captivate their mates with the scent, sight and taste of naturally occurring pelvic secretions during the periodic reset of their cycles to create a new and welcoming environment for an egg should a lover successfully fertilize it. Some even have partners who are interested enough in “swimming in the red sea” to keep a copy of their girlfriend’s menstrual calendar so they have a good idea when she should be at a peak in her libido, when fertile or menstrual. 

Confidence while menstruating: In my course, contemporary sexual health, I teach women to be proud that they are menstruating and use the increase in their libido while menstrual to be creative or strengthen their relationship with a favorite man. So many have been taught that bleeding is shameful and something unclean that it can be difficult for some women to see the positive side of cyclical bleeding even though there may be discomfort associated with it for some few.

The Summer Solstice: A welcome visitor for the occasion, his Grace the Duke of M****, agreed to act as Steward of the Ceremony for the ritual planting of seed. It was a far different position in the Celtic rite from being an active participant as in the past though I had been with him that afternoon in my suite to allow him to plant his seed and milk me before the official celebration began as he is still very fond of me and Verity, his mistress, is not interested in inducing lactation since she is a rising star in the ballet and lactating could cause her career to slow.  As returning readers will recall it is to His Grace that I owe my elevation to the title of 23^rd Baroness Blackthorn so I like to accommodate his desires when I can.

The eleven of us, the five couples and His Grace, took a caravan of Range Rovers in case the weather which is quite changeable here turned rainy. It is a short ride from the castle to the Celtic holy site where we celebrated the arrival of summer. Unlike Location Z there are no spiritual prohibitions of mechanical devices in the area, though as I mentioned in an earlier post the spirit guardians protect the site by turning away the curious by causing them to have a strong nameless fear of the area. We all arrived clad in our shearling robes with the women in Gaynor pointe-shoes with sueded tips and the men wearing Grishko canvas split-sole ballet slippers so the suede soles would grip the worn stone surfaces of the altars. While in the castle’s ladies robing room where we were changing into pointes and our hooded shearling robes I made sure that we all used a good thick water soluble vaginal gel just in case some of us couldn’t lubricate naturally from the cold or not being able to get into the moment as there is nothing more distressing than having a gorgeous but dry man thrusting into a dry vagina. He may not be uncomfortable but his partner soon has the soft tissue of her vaginal walls rubbed raw and burning.

We had all been positioned at (but not on) our assigned altars by11:00 PM and blessedly it was dry with only a slight breeze and there were light clouds with a temperature of about 55° (F). The Old Bull had us all mounted on our altars by 11:30 with us positioned to be taken in missionary with our partners kneeling between our legs erect and dripping pre-ejaculate. Then the Goddess smiled on our ceremony and just at 11:30 the clouds parted briefly and we had a good view of the full moon which I took as a sign of her appreciation of my efforts.

And so it was at exactly11:34 PM BST His Grace gave the signal to begin - a white flare launched from a pistol - and our partners penetrated us and began thrusting. As a precaution I had made certain that the men had all taken a male performance enhancer beforehand to minimize the possibility of erection dysfunctions. Not that there had been any instances of performance inadequacies with these men, but this was the first time that they were performing in such an important ceremony and even for the most steely willed it is sometimes possible to over-think the situation and lose focus. I needn’t have worried they all performed splendidly! As any well trained partner would the men all gave us our pleasure first then took theirs along with additional simultaneous orgasms from us when they came filling each of us with hundreds of millions of highly motile sperm.

The after party: We were active on the altars for about twenty minutes during which Tim milked me after I’d orgasmed and been inseminated and was floating in afterglow. To conclude the ceremony our partners gave us cunilingus and we Kegeled as much of our coitial discharge into their mouths as we could. Then our partners helped us down off the altars and we rode back in precession to the castle for a celebratory full English breakfast served with the Barony’s famous Sloe Brandy and afterward there was the ritual burning of the robes in the castles lower ward.

As a welcome change in costume protocol the Goddess permitted each participant to save his or her shoes, unlike in the past when the shoes worn on the altars at Location Z were burned. I had interceded with the Goddess on the women's behalf as the shoes a women wore while being inseminated on an ancient Celtic altar during a Summer Solstice celebration are something to be treasured to be passed down to her daughters and grand daughters. After the ritual burning of our robes since we had been up until 5:00 AM we all retired to our rooms for more snuggling with our men and then lovely afterglow naps.

BREXIT referendum underway: As this is posted the UK is voting on whether to leave the European Union. As I’ve mentioned before I think the UK withdrawing from the EU would be a serious mistake so I hope our citizens will vote to remain part of the EU. Polling stations will be open from 7am (06:00 GMT) to 10pm (21:00 GMT) local time. It’s going to be a long and historic day!

Christmas at Blackthorn Castle

Crown rack of spring lamb with rosemary and oregano 

The photo: A crown rack of lamb that will melt in your mouth! It’s something that Mrs. Bridges has made the castle’s kitchen famous for.

Christmas at the castle: Christmas day dawned cold with temps in the high 30s (F) with heavy rain almost all day. Fortunately none of us had to go outside unless we wanted to. We have a lovely fifteen foot spruce as a Christmas tree decorated with ornaments handed down from earlier holders of the title augmented down through the years. The lights are new, but the rest is very traditional. Presents were exchanged before breakfast. Though there are no children present Bea at eighteen the youngest girl present seemed almost as excited as I remember being when I was six, the Christmas before my mother died. This year I got lingerie (The giver looks forward to watching me take it off or ripping it off me himself.), perfume and gift certificates to Freed and Gaynor Minden as well as a lovely amethyst (my birthstone) necklace. Marvin gave me a special gift I had been looking for seemingly for ages, but hadn’t been able to find. I’m going to write about that in a separate post.

For the most part I gave practical token but useful fun gifts; razors (beard burn on breasts can be very annoying), condoms and Viagra for the men and Caya diaphragms, spermicide, EllaOne, remote controlled vibis (by Lelo) to be worn in the vagina and toe pads for the women. Caya should be appreciated by men too because the matte textured dome stimulates the glans remarkably and the removal dome can be used by a lover to stimulate the wearer’s G-spot. Just saying…   Later, in a private moment I gave my wards small designer leather bags fitted out and fully equipped as slit-kits.

Menstrual cycle status: Later Christmas morning my wards, their French ballet boyfriends and I took our obligatory ballet and pointe classes to stay flexible for the anticipated ballet and dive-sex. All my wards have frameless, stringless copper bead GyneFix IUDs implanted so they cycle naturally. When I lived in Las Vegas and my wards lived with me they were in menstrual synchrony with me because we sweated so much together that their bodies synched to my pheromones. Now that we live apart Bea and Willow cycle on their own while the Dryads, Bryony and Claire are beginning to sync with my 28 day cycle. Christmas day I was CD14 and ovulated while the Dryads were about CD9 and fertile. Bea and Willow were CD 20 something and luteal.

A first dip in The Wells: The women all followed me down to the shallowest (64 ft.) of the wells. We inserted our latex flat spring diaphragms, used as flood insurance, in case men joined us and wanted dive-sex. But none did as they were glued to the telly binge watching one sport program after another. I had Carla hang a net at 30 feet in the shallow pool as a precaution so if there was an uncontrolled descent the diver wouldn’t fall to the bottom.  

We wore thong bikinis, flippers and swim caps to keep the chemicals out of our hair. Carla checked the fit of our OTS Guardian FFMs and buoyancy compensators with integral weight pockets. She has checked that all the masks were in good repair before we got to the equipment room Willow, Bea and my Guardians have gotten a lot of use but Bryony and Claire just got theirs so they are still getting used to wearing them. One of the nice things is that we can all talk to one another on the comm. units while underwater and we can all hear each other scream, moan, whimper and gasp in orgasm.

Pool temperatures: For Olympic swimming, the Red Cross and FINA (The international governing body of swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming and open water diving), have set the water temperature for competitive swimming between 77° to 82° F (25°-28°C), and 81°F (27°C) for synchronized swimming. Warmer water is less dense and therefore less friction as a swimmers body moves through it. Standard water temperatures ensure that all performances are on a level state of conditions. I have my pools temperatures set at 79° (F) and that is very comfortable. 

Christmas dinner: Dinner on Christmas day for my wards, their boyfriends, Carla my 29 y/o Divemaster and her diver boyfriend, Chris my male Gyn and a ballerina girlfriend and Marvin and I went extremely well. The menu was a typical Christmas feast with turkey and crown rack of spring lamb (for which the castle kitchen is famous) stuffing, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, candid yams, mince pie and ice cream, coffee and hot or ice tea. And Christmas Crackers in which were small favors for each guest.

Sloe Brandy: After dinner the Barony’s famous (or perhaps a better term is infamous) Sloe brandy was served. It is distilled, aged and bottled at the castle from the fruit of the ubiquitous blackthorn bushes used to hedge fields and roads on the Barony. The fruit, called a "sloe", is a drupe 10–12 millimeters (0.39–0.47 in) in diameter, black with a purple-blue waxy bloom, ripening in autumn, and harvested—traditionally, at least in the UK, in October or November after the first frosts.

Charades: After dinner had settled we played a game of charades using the huge wardrobe of costumes and props that had been accumulated by Edith my predecessor. The subject for the evening was film stars from the 50s to present. The Brits seem to love dressing up especially the men who love mincing about in high heels and womens clothes. I think that must be from the sexually repressive upbringing of all-male schools, corporal punishment and cold showers that warp their sexuality. Fortunately some of them make lovely women (until you get their clothes off) so they can be great fun to play charades with!

I thought standouts in men’s roles were: Marvin who did a marvelous impression of Cary Grant “Judy, Judy, Judy”, and Chris who made an amazing Clark Gable, “Frankly Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” Go figure!

Among characters from dance films I portrayed during the evening - with the help of Emily, my dresser, who got me in and out of costume and makeup quickly with her skill as a studio costumer and makeup expert - I became: ‘Olympia’ the Moira Shearer role as a mechanical doll that comes to life in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951); the Cyd Charisse role of ‘The Widow’ dressed in black tights, black pointes, black elbow length gloves and a black bustier with circular white breast accent in  the film Black Tights (1961); and The Natalie Portman role as ‘Nina Sayers’ costumed as the Swan Queen in Black Swan (2010). What fun!

 

 

 

Roland Petit’s Telegraph Obit

Roland Petit and Cyd Charisse in Black Tights 1960

This obit provides a more European perspective on RP’s life.

The Telegraph
Wednesday 13 July, 2011
Theatre Obituaries

Roland Petit

Roland Petit, the choreographer who died on July 10 aged 87, was France's major creative figure in post-war ballet, responsible for defining a new French chic and erotic frankness in dance, typified above all by his wife, the glamorous star Zizi Jeanmaire. He was also probably the favorite choreographer of the world's greatest ballerinas.

An outstanding classical dancer as a youth, Roland Petit swiftly decided on a career as a rebel against the traditionalism of the Paris Opera Ballet, and before the age of 25 had created two of his most iconic ballets, Le Jeune Homme et la mort and Carmen, with the sultry young Jeanmaire as the lethal female destroying a hapless male in both.

These ballets caused a sensation worldwide and Petit and Jeanmaire swiftly became the most exciting names in French dance, closely associating with Jean Cocteau, Edith Piaf, Yves Montand and the new intellectuals of Left Bank Paris.

However Petit was also wooing Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina of Sadler's Wells Ballet, with whom he was having an affair. Fonteyn had cosmetic surgery to shorten her nose at his suggestion (though the operation was redone in London). When still in her twenties, she seriously considered leaving London to join him in Paris, which prompted his other mistress, Jeanmaire, to issue him with an ultimatum.

To reassure Jeanmaire, Petit created Carmen, an encapsulation of Bizet's opera in ballet, which premiered in 1949 at the Prince's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and became an instant world hit. Jeanmaire bobbed her hair short and wore a scant black corset, which, coupled with the candid seductiveness of her pas de deux with Petit, caused both shock and delight among the crowds who rushed to see it. One observer commented that he could see men's trouser buttons popping during the performance.

But the leading English choreographer, Frederick Ashton, then developing into a classical dancemaker of genius at Covent Garden, mourned that he would be seen as out of date.

Fonteyn herself soon decided that a Parisian ballet life with Petit would be more about style and short-term effects than about durably challenging choreography, and she resumed her career with the Sadler's Wells Ballet.

Petit and Renée Jeanmaire married in 1954, and the choreographer reinvented her as "Zizi", one of the immortal icons of Parisian nightlife.

Roland Petit was born on January 13 1924 in Villemomble, a Paris suburb, the elder son of a French café owner and an Italian shoemaker. His mother, Rose Repetto, would leave to set up the Repetto dance shoe business, now an international concern. His father,

Edmond Petit, encouraged his young son in dance lessons and at just 16 he was accepted by the Paris Opera Ballet, then suffering the first straits of the Second World War.

Fast-tracked as a soloist by the director Serge Lifar (Diaghilev's last protégé) the teenager was much influenced by the cosmopolitan artistic intellectualism erupting in wartime Paris, and was taken under the wing of two leading Diaghilev associates, Jean Cocteau and Boris Kochno.

At the end of the war, aged 21 and with backing from his father, Petit founded the anti-establishment Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, taking two unorthodox but brilliant young dancers with him, Jean Babilée and Renée Jeanmaire, who would become icons of the new French dance.

Petit reinvented the suffering, virginal ballerina as a provocative, irresistible femme fatale of the modern day. His post-war works remain some of his most enduring, Les Forains, Le Jeune Homme et la mort (for Babilée), Les demoiselles de la nuit (for Fonteyn in Paris), Carmen, Le Loup, Cyrano de Bergerac and Notre-Dame de Paris, boldly theatrical in design, all recently performed by Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet among other companies.

When Petit and Jeanmaire toured the Ballets de Paris to Hollywood in 1955 his charm conquered Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth, among others. Showered with Hollywood invitations, to Jeanmaire's chagrin he chose a younger lookalike, Leslie Caron, to be the lead in his 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs. He also choreographed the films Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye and Zizi Jeanmaire, The Glass Slipper, again for Caron, and Folies-Bergère, with Jeanmaire and Eddie Constantine.

He made the film Black Tights (1960) to show Zizi Jeanmaire's magnetic balletic gifts alongside Cyd Charisse and Moira Shearer, but he now set about reinventing the Paris revue around his wife, exploring new levels of luxury and sophistication for her many talents. Not only did Jeanmaire dance like an angel in any style, dressed flamboyantly (and sometimes minimally) by costumiers such as Erté, but she possessed an alluring singing voice and a worldly verbal wit that sold countless records.

They became the power couple of Sixties Parisian cultural life, wearing Yves Saint Laurent and collaborating with Andy Warhol.

Petit briefly returned to his alma mater, the Paris Opera Ballet, as director in 1970, but quit after a few months to buy the Casino de Paris specifically to feature Zizi in a supercharged new kind of music-hall, which flourished for five years.

In 1972 he took up leadership of the Ballet de Marseille, to which for the next 25 years the world's major ballerinas beat a trail, Maya Plisetskaya, Natalia Makarova, Alessandra Ferri and Altynai Asylmuratova among them, seeking to dance his flagrantly attractive female roles.

Meanwhile his early ballets proved a magnet for the great male ballet stars of the 1970s. Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov filmed Le Jeune Homme and Carmen, each partnering the evergreen Jeanmaire. Later Petit would choreograph for Baryshnikov's 1985 feature film White Nights.

In Britain, however, Roland Petit remained derided as a showman, compared unfavorably with the Royal Ballet's choreographers Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. Petit created three ballets for Covent Garden, the slight Ballabile (1950), and two late Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicles, a pop-art Paradise Lost (which Mick Jagger loved) and a Pelléas et Mélisande, both of which were given discouraging critical receptions.

English National Ballet offers a rare British viewing of his more durable works, Carmen, Le Jeune Homme et la mort and L'Arlèsienne, at the London Coliseum next week, which Petit was overseeing when he died at home in Geneva.

Among his unusual ventures were the only ballet Orson Wells ever devised, The Lady in the Ice (1953, London), a 1972 Pink Floyd ballet and a Swan Lake with male swans (1998).

Among his many honours, Roland Petit was a Commander of the Légion d'honneur and a Commander of the French Order of Merit. His wife, now 87, and their daughter, Valentine Petit, survive him.

Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87

Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petit in Carmen

The New York Times
July 10, 2011

Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87; Conquered Ballet Taboos and Hollywood

By ANNA KISSELGOFF
Roland Petit, France’s leading choreographer after World War II, who swept away time-honored ballet taboos and whose mix of entertainment and art also made his work popular in Hollywood, died Sunday in Geneva. He was 87 and had lived in Switzerland for more than a decade.

His death was reported by his wife, the ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire, the Paris Opera Ballet said.

Although Mr. Petit choreographed cheerful films like “Hans Christian Andersen” with Danny Kaye, sex and suffering were the themes of the two early ballets that became his international signature pieces: “Carmen” and “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.”

Mr. Petit stunned dance and theater audiences in London in New York in 1949 with a frank new eroticism in his ballet version of “Carmen.” Renée (later Zizi) Jeanmaire was the femme fatale in a short tunic and a gamine hairdo who seduced Mr. Petit, as Don José, in an acrobatic duet on the floor. The headline of the positive review by The New York Herald Tribune’s dance critic, Walter Terry, read “Sex and More Sex.”

John Martin, the critic for The New York Times, was less impressed. “Passion and the classical pas de deux are poles apart,” he wrote.

“Carmen” might have been directly accessible in its stylized realism. But Mr. Petit, a dancer as well as a choreographer, displayed a deeper side in his 1946 masterpiece, “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” (“The Young Man and Death”). Here, he showed the resonant poetic dimension seen in the pieces in which he collaborated with some of France’s major writers, poets, composers and visual artists.

For “Le Jeune Homme,” Jean Cocteau devised a scenario about a bohemian painter in his garret, ostensibly waiting for his sweetheart but eventually embroiled in an existential battle for survival. Jean Babilée, that ballet’s unforgettable star (who also contributed some of the choreography), smoked a real cigarette onstage on a real bed, looked at his real watch and kicked real furniture around before engaging in a violent confrontation with his girlfriend.

The painter hanged himself in despair and his lover revealed herself as an allegorical figure of death before leading the antihero across a surreal rooftop panorama of Paris. Cocteau’s typical touch of the mythic made commonplace fused wonderfully with Petit’s naturalism (as opposed to realism) and use of ballet bravura.

A metaphor for postwar disillusion, the ballet struck a nerve in Europe but also impressed in New York when Ballet Theater presented it in 1951, with Mr. Babilée and Nathalie Philippart.

But it was also an experimental, conceptual work. After the cast had rehearsed it only to jazz, Cocteau suddenly substituted Bach’s Passacaglia for the performances.

Working within two extremes, as represented by the show-business-flavored "Carmen" and the poetic “Jeune Homme,” Mr. Petit remained a subject for debate throughout more than a half-century, in which he choreographed some 150 ballets.

American critics often called him chic. Even French critics began to find him superficial. Yet after he turned to creating ballets based on opera and literature, he could surprise.

In New York in 1980, the National Ballet of Marseille (headed by Mr. Petit since 1972), presented Mr. Petit’s eloquent commentary on Marcel Proust and his work in “Marcel Proust Remembered.” Ms. Jeanmaire carried his ballet version of “Fledermaus” in “The Bat.” His updated view of “Coppélia” had a witty if kinky approach: as Coppélius, he waltzed with a female dummy (the doll Coppélia) strapped to his body.

Karen Kain, now artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, was a guest artist in this “Coppélia.” Among the many ballet stars for whom he choreographed were Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova. Both Mr. Baryshnikov and Mr. Nureyev danced in “Jeune Homme” shortly after they left the Soviet Union for the West.

Mr. Petit also developed the talents of two future stars. When he co-founded Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées, he engaged two teenage dancers, Leslie Caron and Violette Verdy.

Roland Petit was born on Jan. 13, 1924, in Villemomble, near Paris. His father, Edmond Petit, had a restaurant in the Halles district; his mother founded the dancewear company Repetto. Fond of dancing to a player piano in the restaurant, the young Roland was enrolled in the Paris Opera Ballet School at 9 and joined the company’s corps at 16.

Chafing at the company’s restrictions, he left to choreograph in a series organized by the critic Irene Lidova. These performances led Mr. Petit and Lidova to found Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées with Boris Kochno, Serge Diaghilev’s collaborator and secretary.

Mr. Petit left in 1947 to form his own company, Les Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit. Wooed by Hollywood, he choreographed “Hans Christian Andersen” in 1951 before marrying Ms. Jeanmaire, who survives him, as does their daughter, Valentine Petit. Among the other films he choreographed were “Daddy Long Legs” (1955) “The Glass Slipper” (1955) and “Anything Goes” (1956).

Mr. Petit returned to Paris to choreograph for ballets and music hall revues (some starring his wife). He briefly served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet but resigned after a dispute and later moved to Marseille, where he was director until he left in 1998, reportedly in a disagreement with the management.

Like Maurice Béjart, Mr. Petit sought to reach a wide audience. Yet he had a more solid choreographic foundation, and his early ballets work on an artistic level still valid today.

Ms. Lidova once admitted that Mr. Petit could fall into a “Champagne style.” But she also noted, rightly, that he was an artist of contrasts, “who can be both frivolous and serious, passionate and cruel.”

Personal comment: I first remember seeing Roland Petit in a video of the 1960 film Black Tights with Moira Shearer, Zizi Jeanmaire and Cyd Charisse. Black Tights as well as The Red Shoes were the two films that reinforced my desire to be a ballet dancer.

The next Victoria Page?

Summer Glau tying on her pointes

The Next Victoria Page: Aside from Cyd Charisse and Leslie Caron both of whom went in to films in the 1940s and 50s when the movie star system was still at its height young ballet dancers chosen to star in dance films have not done particularly well with a career in dance. Summer Glau is certainly attractive but the role of the heroine in The Red Shoes, Vicky Page, requires a young and extremely talented dancer. Summer Glau while a talented actress is not Victoria Page! Moira Shearer was 21 y/o when filming began on The Red Shoes in 1947. Summer Glau was born in 1981, is 28, and in my opinion is too old and lacks the talent for the part of an extremely talented ingénue. Shearer had the look, Glau doesn’t! I think it would be a mistake to remake The Red Shoes, but if someone did they should choose a young, talented, professional dancer. Whoever got the part would be forever typecast, which I think would stop a lot of intensely focused women who are serious about making classical ballet a career from accepting the part. Though, competitiveness being what it is in ballet many would kill for the role. Several women who made ballet films in the last few years (in no particular order) are:

1) Leslie Browne – an ABT Soloist - as Emilia Rodgers in The Turning Point (1977)
And, Dancers (1987) Leslie Browne as Nadine

2) Amanda Schull – a SFB corps member - as Jody Sawyer in Center stage (2000)

3) Neve Campbell as Loretta 'Ry' Ryan in The Company (2004) about the Joffrey in Chicago

A wish: I hope no one does a remake of The Red Shoes. You just can’t improve on perfection! And if they do they should choose someone in her early 20s with real talent and a romantic style rather than blazingly fast Balanchine footwork. Now, they could make a Red Shoes like film focusing on a young woman’s obsession with a career on pointe and finding the perfect shoes, while dealing with the typical career trials; eating disorders, STI and pregnancy scares, injuries and competition for roles she had to overcome as she works her way to a principal position with an international company.

The Red Shoes - Part II

Title from the 1948 film

The New York Times
November 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist

Ballet’s Mean Streets

By MAUREEN DOWD

Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on.

One of those, for me, is “The Red Shoes.” Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.

There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff’s wailing to Ahab’s whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously haunting. The destructive obsession portrayed here is not with a lover or outside object of desire. It’s about the tyranny of creativity.

As the white-skinned, blue-blooded ballerina Vicky Page, Moira Shearer dons the red slippers and is forced to choose between love and art.

There was never a screen pairing more magical than Moira and Technicolor. The flame-haired Scottish dancer is so radiant in the Criterion DVD of the 1948 classic directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that it’s impossible to believe she could glow more brightly. But in the lovingly polished version of the British movie that debuted at Cannes and is now showing at Film Forum in New York, Moira is even more incandescent.

The original backers of the movie had so little confidence that a stylized tragic ballet film could do well that they didn’t even give it an official London premiere.

Now Martin Scorsese calls “The Red Shoes” “one of the true miracles of film history.” He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell’s reputation. His Film Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive have taken the lead in digitally alchemizing the movie from cracked, shrunk, moldy negatives.

Scorsese fell in love with the movies of Powell and Pressburger when he was an asthmatic kid living in a four-room tenement apartment in New York, watching “Million Dollar Movie” on TV and going to theaters with his dad.

“They have a flair and flamboyance you don’t usually find in films being made at that time,” he told me. “And a fearlessness about emotion. They create worlds that take no prisoners.”

In “Black Narcissus,” their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr — they seemed drawn to redheads for Technicolor — the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes orange. “That’s such a wonderful way to express desire,” Scorsese marveled.

In a letter to Kerr in the early ’40s, Pressburger laid out their manifesto, including: “No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.”

In the early ’70s, Scorsese tracked down the broke and discredited Powell in London and took him to a pub.

“Michael was very surprised to hear that his films had thrilled a younger audience and given fuel to the imagination of myself and Brian De Palma and Francis Coppola,” Scorsese once recalled. “He went home that night and recorded in his diary that he felt his blood course through his veins again after meeting us in the bar.”

In 1980, Coppola invited Powell to become a consultant at Zoetrope Studios. He moved to America and married Scorsese’s film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color red. He didn’t like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of “Raging Bull” and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.) Powell told him “Mean Streets” had too much red lighting and he should take some out. (He didn’t.)

“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.

The shimmering Moira Shearer could never take off the red shoes, either.

“To be constantly associated with that one film is really quite dismaying,” she once said. “It’s as though I’d done nothing else in my life. I mean, it’s odd, when you’re 61, to be haunted by something you’ve done when you were 21!”

She resisted doing the movie, finding the script “silly and banal”; she feared it would deflect her from a classical ballet career. And when she died at 80 in 2006, her husband dismissively called her film work “a bit of a distraction.”

Shearer said she faced hostility when she returned to the ballet world from some who considered her overnight movie fame frivolous. She always worried that she was succeeding more for her looks than her dancing.

She was eclipsed by Margot Fonteyn, married, had four children and receded. She wrote a book about her experiences with George Balanchine. As Clive Barnes wrote in Dance Magazine, “She had a disappointing and disappointed dance career.”

In later years, Shearer was asked to give her occupation in “Who’s Who.”

“Writer,” she replied.

Personal comment: It would be interesting to know what Shearer’s career would have been like in classical ballet if she had not done the film. Dame Nanette de Valois the founder of Sadler’s Wells Ballet as the company was known at the time of the film could be every bit as emperious as Boris Lermontov and Margot Fonteyn was the star. Many incredably talented women languished in Fonteyn’s shadow during her too long career with de Valois’s companies. When the company toured the U.S. after The Red Shoes became a huge hit in America everyone wanted to see Shearer dance rather than Fonteyn and management, and one presumes Fonteyn, were not happy. Here is The Red Shoes trailer from the un-restored original film.

The Red Shoes

Moira Shearer as Victoria Page in The Red Shoes

The New York Times
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: November 5, 2009

A Tragic Ballerina Dances Again, Her Shoes Now Redder Than Ever

“Why do you want to dance?” barks the imperious ballet impresario Boris Lermontov in “The Red Shoes,” the 1948 masterpiece from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

“Why do you want to live?” answers the young ballerina, Victoria Page, her face pale and pure as cream. It’s a mad, beautiful line, yet she utters it so easily, without apparent effort or guile, that you know that she means it and that you’re meant to believe it too. She dances because she must, because there is no choice. She dances until the sweat beads on her brow, and the abyss opens. Mostly, she dances because she is a flame for art, blazing bright until she is snuffed out.

Widely deemed the most famous ballet film ever made, “The Red Shoes,” directed by Powell and written by Pressburger (officially sharing the credits), has been the inspiration for countless bleeding feet and soaring artistic passions since its release. It is likely to seduce yet new generations of seekers and true believers, some of whom will doubtless be practicing demi-pliés on the ticket line when the movie — recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with help from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and several other groups — opens at Film Forum on Friday for a two-week run. This is essential viewing because even if you think you have seen the movie before its restoration, if you’re under 60, you probably haven’t seen it anywhere near its original Technicolor glory.

This born-again version of “The Red Shoes,” digitally resuscitated from battered prints and negatives, should surprise even those who have watched the fine Criterion DVD. A film like few others, made like few others — the Powell and Pressburger partnership remains sui generis — it reaches high and strikes its mark, at times improbably. It’s an insistently designed work of non-naturalism, daubed with startling, unreal, gaudy colors that seem to have been created to blast away the last traces of wartime drear. The colors in “The Red Shoes” don’t just exist, they also express. “Color and I are one,” the painter Paul Klee said. When watching “The Red Shoes,” it’s easy to imagine Powell saying the same. Instead, he said, “I am cinema.”

Loosely taken from the macabre Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Red Shoes” follows Vicky (Moira Shearer, a real ballerina, making her film debut) from her first determined steps in the corps to stardom in Lermontov’s company. Partly based on the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev — with some Powell thrown in — and played with mesmerizing ferocity by the Viennese-born actor Anton Walbrook, Lermontov drives Vicky toward perfection, insisting that she sacrifice everything for art, even her heart. But she falls in love with Julian Craster (Marius Goring), the composer of the work that makes her a star, succumbing to him as she rehearses the ballet. Enraged by her supposed betrayal, Lermontov fires Julian, and Vicky quits, only to later and fatally return.

Vicky is caught between Julian, the selfish lover who wants her only for himself, and Lermontov, whose obsession with her appears to transcend the sexual, suggesting a kind of demonic possession. A suave number partial to sunglasses, Lermontov appears several times in and on trains belching clouds of smoke, an evocation of Vicky’s catastrophic final leap. (According to Powell, Ms. Shearer leapt without a double, landing on a mattress.) Until then, Vicky spins and spins and spins, her vertiginous journey visually echoed in the images of fans and a rotating record and, in one astonishing scene, a seemingly endless spiral staircase on which she flees the theater and its fantasies to head into the hard light of the real world.

“The ballet of ‘The Red Shoes,’ ” Lermontov explains to Julian early in the film, “is the story of a young girl who is devoured by an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes, goes to the dance. And first all goes well, and she’s very happy.” She tires, but: “The red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the streets, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forest, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.” Then what happens? Julian asks, not realizing that he’s asking for the end of his own story.

“Oh,” Lermontov says with a small wave of the hand. “In the end she dies.”

This is about as much exposition as Pressburger provides in a screenplay that, while richly embroidered with memorable, quotable lines (“Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat”), is a vehicle for cinema, not speeches. Indeed, several nondance scenes unfold without a word, as does the spectacular 15-minute ballet centerpiece. (The choreographer Robert Helpmann dances the part of the boy, while Léonide Massine, a Diaghilev protégé, makes a dazzling and suitably devilish cobbler.) Somewhat reminiscent of Busby Berkeley’s more fantastic dance numbers, the ballet doesn’t take place on a conventional, constricted stage, for the viewing pleasure of a clapping audience, but in a purely cinematic realm, complete with trick photography.

In this strange and violent dance, the theater’s walls melt away, and the barriers between Vicky and her character, between art and life, at which Lermontov has been steadily pounding, give way. That life and art are finally inseparable is a theme of the story, or perhaps its lesson. This refusal of barriers extends to the filmmaking itself, which draws on other arts — literature, painting, dance and music — and recombines them into cinema. That synthesis, in turn, is mirrored by the creative partnership of the two filmmakers, who, calling themselves the Archers, usually shared the credit “written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” an acknowledgment of the intimacy of their collaboration and shared vision.

A box office disappointment in Britain, where it was indifferently released by the producer J. Arthur Rank, “The Red Shoes” was a smash elsewhere, playing for two years in Manhattan. Not long ago I met a woman who said she watched it every week for a year when it opened in Los Angeles. She went on to dance with Arthur Freed’s unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, home to some of the most glorious film musicals not made by Powell and Pressburger. In his autobiography Powell writes that Gene Kelly repeatedly showed “The Red Shoes” to MGM executives before getting permission to make Vincente Minnelli’s “American in Paris” — an influence most evident in the long ballet Kelly dances in that film. Time rushes by. The red shoes dance on.

Personal Comment: The film The Red Shoes was the first ballet film I ever saw. My Mom had it on VHS when I was 5 y/o and I watched it over and over. Mom being a dancer herself wanted me to see the glory and heartbreak of ballet saying - when my father protested about the violent ending - that I was not too young to learn about determination and life’s great passions. The Red Shoes has inspired me my entire career – to put ballet first, take my pleasure when and where I can and not get too emotionally tangled with a man. I think it is a film every young girl should see.