Pacific Northwest Ballet goes through roughly 2,000 pairs of pointe shoes per year. New York City Ballet uses 500 pairs per month during Nutcracker season. Some pros exhaust multiple pairs of shoes in a single performance day. Stats like those raise a big question: After the shanks have collapsed and the boxes have turned to mush, where do all the dead pointe shoes go?

I would very much like to go back eight months in time and beg that naive version of myself to meet with a physical therapist before diving back into rigorous training. How I’m moving forward while managing an injury is this month’s topic.

Raise your hand if you knew that the shape of your feet can change over time. If you did, you’re smarter than me and I respect that. If you didn’t, welcome to the club! After nine years off of dancing, the last thing I anticipated to be a problem in my training was my feet. […]

Hopefully, a regular routine of living room relevés is keeping your pointework alive during the social distancing era. Now there’s one more thing you can do from home: get fitted for pointe shoes. But should you forgo an in-person fitting? Discount Dance Supply started planning its Virtual Pointe Fitting program about six months ago, long […]

As ballet’s gender roles grow increasingly blurred, more men than ever are reaching new heights: the tips of their toes. It’s no longer just Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and the few pointe-clad male character parts, like in Cinderella or Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream. Some male dancers are starting to experiment with pointe […]

It turns out that TikTok is good for more than just viral dance challenges. Case in point: We recently stumbled across this genius pointe shoe hack for dancers with narrow heels. what I expected to go viral on TikTok for:-my cat that can do backflips-video of the dog cafe I live across from… https://t.co/QQHqOOwxsQ — […]

Pointe shoes are high maintenance. New pairs are not only expensive, but time consuming. So it’s no surprise that many dancers try to extend the lifespan of each shoe. But did you know that dancing on dead shoes can increase your risk for a variety of injuries? What causes a shoe to break down? Pointe […]

On the morning of May 1, Miriam Barbosa posted a photo of her daughter, Itzkan, on Facebook. The image itself is striking—Itzkan stands smiling on pointe in front of Miami City Ballet, where she has spent the last year as a pre-professional student, perched atop a mountain of old pointe shoes of all different sizes. […]