The Agony and the Ecstasy: The feet in ballet and yoga

With excitement I took my five year old daughter, lover of pretty dresses and sparkly shoes, to watch her first professional ballet. I hadn’t been to the ballet since primary school. Like most little girls, she was entranced. I on the other hand, felt a jumble of mixed emotions. The dedication, poise and grace of the dancers was awe inspiring, but I couldn’t help feeling disturbed by those pointe shoes. 

They just look so unnatural and outdated, like some medieval form of torture. A type of corset for the foot. Maybe I am biased, being a yoga teacher living in a very outdoor country, but in my world, feet are freely exposed, happily bare. I encourage my students to spread their toes and feel the sand and grass under their feet. I believe, in the words of inspirational yogini Vanda Scaravelli that ‘The soles of the feet and the palms of the hands are centers of vitality and by spreading, they also meet and receive energy from the earth.’ I am also acutely aware of the effects that problems in the feet can have on the rest of the body, particularly the pelvis and spine. 

Being in the audience witnessing classical ballet en pointe began filling me with trepidation. I felt welcome relief when dances were performed in soft, flat ballet shoes or bare feet. Those dancers seemed relaxed and freely expressive, compared to classical ballet’s stilted porcelain figures that could shatter at any instant. With their feet on the ground the performers became as soft and pliable as clay. Modern ballet and especially contemporary dance seemed more honest – like emotion given physical form. Watching it I felt irresistibly lured to throw off my shoes and join the dance: to coil and twist and roll, to fling and spring and contort… and then unfold like a metamorphosing butterfly.

But back to classical ballet. I found myself scrutinising the glittering Prima Ballerina’s face as she balanced in a graceful arabesque, carrying almost her full body weight on her big toe. I could see the intense strain of the position -she almost seemed to stop breathing to avoid falling- as if for a moment she wished to be frozen like a cardboard cut-out. But I noticed slight shuddering as her sleek, athletic frame mustered all its power to remain perfectly poised. And her face, spoke wordlessly with an expression that was, and I unsuccessfully mentally searched for another word to describe it, ‘pained’. It might have been a look of utter concentration, but the narrowing of her eyes, the slight scowl in her lips, thinly masked by an adhesive smile, undoubtedly revealed suffering. It ignited my compassion. I rooted for her to remain balanced throughout the seemingly endless, torturous pose. She remained on one leg almost forever, and finally extended her calf behind her in a triumphant flourish of self- congratulation. Or was it relief that she could return both feet to the ground?

Back home I felt compelled to do some research and found my intuition was sadly accurate. Articles describe a horrible selection of ailments that can be caused by pointe shoes including toenail bruising, corns and bunions. The repeated strain of dancing on the toes can stunt the growth of the foot or even result in stress fractures in the bones. Although they wear softer, flat shoes, male dancers risk injuring their ankles and lower legs because of all the jumping and lifting they do. A few male dancers interviewed by Emma John (Emma John discovers what ballet does to a dancer’s feet), confess to have pushed themselves to perform with serious ankle injuries.  In her article Beneath the beautiful ballet, a brutal toll on the body, Maggie Hendrix reveals how a successful ballerina danced for two years with seven fractured bones in her foot, thinking it was tendonitis.  

Is this spectacle truly satisfying and appropriate for modern audiences? I felt a bit like I had been in a Roman amphitheatre watching a gladiator battle a lion with his bare hands. I wondered if I should be endorsing this, particularly to wide-eyed little people and members of the next generation.

Since I began practising yoga more seriously, about twenty years ago, I mulled over these questions about pleasure and pain. Through my wonderful yoga teachers I was introduced to a way of working with the body that was diametrically opposite to my childhood experiences of ballet and gymnastics classes, which had involved tightly scraped, gelled hairdo’s and hours of rigorous training. These disciplines had required a pulling or pushing of the body to achieve an aesthetically pleasing shape. But the shape often felt stiff and physically restrictive. Plastic smiles were regularly rehearsed, often to camouflage our true emotions, which might have been fear, anxiety, exhaustion or even pain. Was that a good skill to learn: suppressing emotion in the name of physical perfection?

Yoga was a revelation. I was allowed and encouraged by my teachers to truly breathe with my whole body. I was gently coaxed to unravel layers of conditioning, of holding and suppressing. It felt like a revolution. There were no mirrors to analyse whether I had the ideal arch in my foot or bend in my elbow. It was all guided by feeling. What a relief for my entire being! I could move in the natural way that I enjoyed and in freeing myself from layers of habitual tension I found a deep, innate strength.  Like a plant that was watered, warmed by the sun and spoken to tenderly, I unfurled my leaves and spread them to the sky. I plugged my hands and feet into the earth in dog pose and felt my spine dance. My legs floated up into headstand. On my feet I stood, with toes spread, feet hip-width apart, feeling the length and breadth of my bare footprints and became effortlessly upright.

This was liberation. This was bliss. With each breath, with each moment, my body thanked me. In those early yoga days I was often flooded with sunny childhood memories, remembering a time when I was free, barefoot, climbing trees and running on grass. Unconditioned, unpostured. 

Through my yoga practice and teaching I have assisted students to discover the ground, surrender to gravity and enliven their feet.  I have witnessed the transformational effect it has on their spines, psychology and lives. The therapeutic power of this work for back and joint pain is a true gift. One of my teachers is convinced she went up a shoe size when, through yoga, her feet blossomed into their natural shape. 

So being faced with a suffering ballerina in pointe shoes was a shock. I find it quite incredible that in the 21^st Century women (and some men) still want to bind up their feet and balance painfully on their toes in the name of culture. Does distorting the natural shape of the foot make a dancer more graceful? In the era of #MeToo and female Afghan rappers, there is a worldwide movement to stand up strongly and vocally against abuse. So why do we continue to abuse ourselves in pursuit of an outdated concept of beauty?

This echoes another cause in my campaign to free the foot. Although a rare sight in our seaside town, in cities many women still choose to agonise in high heels. I gave them up years ago, around the time I more seriously embraced my yoga practice. And I smiled to myself in May when I heard that actress Kristen Stewart removed her heels and walked the Cannes red carpet barefoot in protest to the film festival’s ‘heels only’ policy for women. This gives me hope that eventually we will all liberate our feet, and in doing so, liberate ourselves.