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.

Alastair Macaulay on The Nutcracker

Scene from New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker

The Nutcracker: In celebration of the Christmas season I’m posting this piece by Alastair Macaulay, dance critic for the NYT.

The New York Times
December 17, 2009
Dance
Depths to Plumb, Sugarplum
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

As 2009 ends, it’s worth remembering that it has been the centenary of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes’s turning ballet into the genre that was a prime vehicle for modernism. Meanwhile it’s hard to forget that we are deep into the annual “Nutcracker” season, in which tutus, snowflakes, sweets, the Sugarplum Fairy, magic and a child’s vision of transformation all come together. Few American cities are “Nutcracker”-free zones at this time of year; among those in New York, City Ballet’s production by George Balanchine runs now for two and a half more weeks, and that’s just the best known. Are modernism and “The Nutcracker” irreconcilable?

No. Though Diaghilev specialized in showing three or four modern works per evening, he was not above the full-length traditional ballet. He hit upon the idea of his “Sleeping Princess” production in 1921 because he was looking for a long-running blockbuster (along the lines of the hit musical of the day, “Chu Chin Chow”) to finance his more esoteric efforts. When his colleague Serge Grigoriev told him that such a production would soon bore him, Diaghilev — hoping that it would be the cash cow he needed — said: “Not at all. You’d run it, and I’d do something else.” Poor Diaghilev never found his cash cow. But his protégé Balanchine did. His 1954 “Nutcracker,” with the Christmas tree that grows like Jack’s beanstalk, has proved the most successful production of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet in world history. (The original “Nutcracker,” which also had a tree that grew, opened in St. Petersburg when Diaghilev was a young man there.) Balanchine’s version also gave New York City Ballet the stability with which he was able to create his most avant-garde productions, notably “Agon” (Stravinsky, 1957) and “Episodes” (Webern, 1959).

You can love those two pieces, which remain far ahead of their time in body language and structure, and still find Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” enthralling. Every season I revisit his “Nutcracker” several times, officially to see New York City Ballet’s cast changes in the lead roles in Act II. But at every viewing the chief reward is to discover yet more detail in Act I. Over the decades thousands of dancegoers have learned to think the same; many might agree that Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” is actually more expressively diverse, more theatrically rich, than the extreme modernism of “Agon” or “Episodes” or his Stravinsky masterpieces of the 1960s and ’70s.

In a recent article in The Washington Post, Sarah Kaufman writes of the “pervading tweeness” of “The Nutcracker,” wishes that “ballet had something better to do at this time of year than endlessly reminisce like a sweet, whiskery auntie,” and argues that the work’s “stranglehold is all but squeezing ballet dry.” By contrast, she harks back to the Diaghilev days, “when ballet — ballet — lassoed the avant-garde art movement.”

The full-length ballets, Ms. Kaufman writes, are “European derived.” (Yes, but then, ballet itself is European derived, as are a great many other arts.) So “what’s American about ballet in America?” she asks. “Why not make an artistic statement with a mix of races, and use the spectrum of humanity deliberately, in a provocative way? Why not harness differences to evoke the America of today, or what we might become if only we had the imagination of an artist?”

Consider “The Hard Nut,” the version of “The Nutcracker” that Mark Morris first staged in Brussels in 1991, and that has been revived many times in America and elsewhere. The party scene is a caricature of a period and a none-too-happy white American family (with a black maid); then the stage world is magically metamorphosed into a colorful mixed-race fantasy in which ballet and barefoot dancers are equally mixed to show a view of society that is both modern-American and transcendent. You can watch it on DVD — it won the “Battle of the ‘Nutcrackers’ ” competition on Ovation TV — and in recent years it has become an annual fixture at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif.

“The Hard Nut” is not a perfect work. Not all of its storytelling is clear, a few of its dances are thin, and it forces some of its narrative against the emphasis of Tchaikovsky’s score. But no American “Nutcracker” has been so internationally successful, and within America perhaps only Balanchine’s is better known. In its finest dances — the Waltz of the Snowflakes above all — that black and white dancers are side by side is merely a premise for an even larger view of humanity, with Mr. Morris’s musicality at its most theatrically exhilarating.

There’s plenty wrong with ballet today, not least with American ballet. It’s sadly true that there are ballet companies whose only annual performances are of “The Nutcracker,” and that almost every American ballet company relies on its “Nutcracker” performances as its most reliable draw. (European companies dance “The Nutcracker” too, but few of them so extensively. The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, for example, often has “Nutcracker”-free years, and my time in London made me more used to watching Frederick Ashton’s staging of Prokofiev’s three-act “Cinderella” as Christmas fare than any “Nutcracker.”)

But let’s not castigate “The Nutcracker” just because it is the cash cow of American ballet. And let’s not make the mistake of assuming the tweeness of bad “Nutcracker” productions means that the ballet is itself twee.

Just listen to the ballet’s overture. In good productions the view of childhood that starts here, in the miniature orchestration and quick pulse of Tchaikovsky’s introduction, is enchantingly serious. Gradually the music will build in scale until you reach the colossal, slow, full-orchestral grandeur of the Sugarplum adagio in Act II: no ballet score has a greater span, and this shows how passionately Tchaikovsky was depicting the inner life of a child.

There are, by contrast, a number of full-length ballets that take up adult subject matter only to treat it frivolously. (“Le Corsaire” and “Don Quixote,” both musically cheap, are among the most traditional examples. Stanton Welch’s 2009 ballet about Marie Antoinette, “Marie,” is the most recent one I’ve seen.) Much about ballet is bad and is worth trashing; much about it is artistically tawdry and hidebound in bad tradition; and most of its current choreographers are at best poor.

“The Nutcracker,” however, is a musical masterpiece and, in some stagings, a theatrical masterpiece too. Ballet is larger, not smaller, because of it