A Dangerous Sense of Aesthetics

I should try having a productive day sometime. I still haven't gone through all of my papers like I keep telling myself to, or made much a dent in my reading list like I know I need to, or written much new stuff like I keep telling everyone else I'm going to.

So I'll ramble about this poem I've been working on and off of with for a few months now. The prompt: describe a pair of shoes in such a way to evoke thoughts of death. I'm not necessarily committed to keeping 100% to the prompt, but I think it's a good prompt. I decided to try it with a pair of ballet shoes. I have a sort of idea of what I'd like to accomplish, but can't really make anything work. In the process of trying to write though, I've learned quite a lot about ballet and ballet shoes because I can be rather gung ho about technical accuracy.

There's a specific type of ballet shoe called pointe shoes - the type of shoes that allow a dancer to do that fancy move on their toes (en pointe). Pointe training cannot begin until at least 12 years old - the 26 bones of the feet do not fully ossify until 20 to 30 years of age - and the early years of pointe training are crucial.

Shoes are typically made of either satin (only worn for performance), canvas, or leather. Parts incude the box, shank, and ribbons; the box supports the toes while the shank takes care of the arch. The ribbons used to secure the shoe in place do not come attached - the dancer must sew them on herself after determining optimal placement on her own feet. A pair of pointe shoes will last for about 10-20 hours of wear - for professional dancers, a new pair can wear out in a single performance. Ballet companies often provide shoe allowances for their students.

That's a decent background, but what got me interested was actually learning about ballet life; there's a standard of beauty in the ballet industry called the Balanchine body, the ideal form a dancer is supposed to have. The Balanchine body is tall, slender, long, narrow neck and legs, short torso, small breasts, narrow hips, and little to no fat deposits. The desired type is traced back to George Balanchine who wanted to "see the bones" of his dancers.

The body type occurs in about 1% of the population naturally and is the cause of many an eating disorder in the ballet world. The average incidence of eating disorders in white, middle aged women is about 1 in 100. In ballet dancers, it's about 1 in 5.Personally, I'd save time trying to get such a streamlined body by just lying down in front of a steamroller.

Additionally, because peak dancing years occur in young adults, most dancers aiming for a professional career do not attend any sort of higher education - the pressure to keep such an unnatural figure is now tied to thier livelihood. A dancer that gains weight or becomes injured is a dancer out of work. Ballet companies are known to have "appearance clauses" in their contracts and ballet directors often percieve the amount of weight a dancer loses as a sign of dedication to the craft. The standard applies to all dancers, even as young as eleven.

Male dancers do have similar issues, but nowhere close to anything described above, mainly due to a shortage of male dancers everywhere. They have no weight or appearance requirements - by and large, ballet companies take what they can get with men. Female dancers cope with, or, if they've been raised into ballet, become accustomed to harsh criticism, competition, and accept being up to 15% underweight as normal.

In short, "Black Swan" is a documentary.

My obvious route is to use a pair of pointe shoes and somehow constuct a poem to imply the dancer who wore them died of malnourishment and starvation. If I wanted to go really depressing, I could imply it was a very young dancer at that. I can't figure out for the life of me how to get that to paper though :/ Ballet has a lot of potential for fantastic imagery (swans, ribbons, stagelights, empty theater seats, etc.) so I really do love the idea and don't want to toss it out until I've throughly exhausted myself with it.