Behind-the-Scenes of the Carolina Ballet's footwear
Now that the theatre season and the academic year have ended, i've picked up a couple weeks of overhire work at the Carolina Ballet on their last production of their season, a double bill of Beauty and the Beast and Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I hadn't worked on ballet costumes since my stint at the Boston Ballet back in 1998, and it's been interesting to get back into that whole mindset and realm of costume concerns.
One of the primary crafts needs of a ballet company is coloration of footwear. Shoes are a concern in all types of dance performance, but the aesthetic tradition of ballet has a very specific set of variables to deal with. All the shoes must exactly match the dancers' tights, to help maintain the seamless visual line of the leg/foot in performance. Each dancer has a specific preference in footwear--style, material, brand--which must be tracked and adhered to across the spectrum of costume needs. Standard ballet slippers may be leather or various weaves and fiber contents of cloth, and then there are pointe shoes to consider. For a large professional dance company, shoe stock and their tracking and coloring alone can be a staff position in and of itself.
The Carolina Ballet is a sizable professional company, but their budgets and programming are not such that they can employ a full-time shoe specialist--they typically handle shoe needs in-house except on large new-build works like this Beethoven piece. So this is where i come in as an overhire craftsperson and dyer!
There are a number of products you can use to color canvas ballet slippers.
The Carolina Ballet uses the Dye-Na-Flow range of water-based flowable textile colorants.
I like to use a wide flat brush like this to paint ballet slippers.
It helps me to get good coverage in the tucks of the toebox without affecting the leather footpads.
Shoes on the drying rack. This image shows the range of dancer preference,
not only style and material but also whether they prefer to break them in
before or after the coloration process.
This was a fun project! Slipper alteration for a character in
Beauty and the Beast called the Monkey. His toe curl is made of
headliner foam so as not to interfere with the dancer's movement.
Pointe shoe dye tests. Potential products to use include (from left):
Dylon satin dye, Evangeline slipper dyes, International shoe dyes.
All are solvent-based as water-based products destroy the pointe foundation structure.
Unrelated to shoes, here's the Monkey's mask and fez! Ballet headgear and masks
must allow the dancer to perform physically-demanding choreography.
This mask is flexible latex, close-fitting with large eye openings.
It is all mounted on a hood which attaches under the chin and around the neck
for maximum stability and support.
I don't have any photos of them, but there are also a range of leather ballet slippers i've been painting using the Angelus and EcoFlow lines of leather paints. Tarrago is another brand of paints formulated expressly for flexible leather footwear.
Hope you enjoyed this brief foray into ballet shoe craftwork! I sure have appreciated the opportunity to be involved in it myself.
One of the primary crafts needs of a ballet company is coloration of footwear. Shoes are a concern in all types of dance performance, but the aesthetic tradition of ballet has a very specific set of variables to deal with. All the shoes must exactly match the dancers' tights, to help maintain the seamless visual line of the leg/foot in performance. Each dancer has a specific preference in footwear--style, material, brand--which must be tracked and adhered to across the spectrum of costume needs. Standard ballet slippers may be leather or various weaves and fiber contents of cloth, and then there are pointe shoes to consider. For a large professional dance company, shoe stock and their tracking and coloring alone can be a staff position in and of itself.
The Carolina Ballet is a sizable professional company, but their budgets and programming are not such that they can employ a full-time shoe specialist--they typically handle shoe needs in-house except on large new-build works like this Beethoven piece. So this is where i come in as an overhire craftsperson and dyer!
There are a number of products you can use to color canvas ballet slippers.
The Carolina Ballet uses the Dye-Na-Flow range of water-based flowable textile colorants.
I like to use a wide flat brush like this to paint ballet slippers.
It helps me to get good coverage in the tucks of the toebox without affecting the leather footpads.
Shoes on the drying rack. This image shows the range of dancer preference,
not only style and material but also whether they prefer to break them in
before or after the coloration process.
This was a fun project! Slipper alteration for a character in
Beauty and the Beast called the Monkey. His toe curl is made of
headliner foam so as not to interfere with the dancer's movement.
Pointe shoe dye tests. Potential products to use include (from left):
Dylon satin dye, Evangeline slipper dyes, International shoe dyes.
All are solvent-based as water-based products destroy the pointe foundation structure.
Unrelated to shoes, here's the Monkey's mask and fez! Ballet headgear and masks
must allow the dancer to perform physically-demanding choreography.
This mask is flexible latex, close-fitting with large eye openings.
It is all mounted on a hood which attaches under the chin and around the neck
for maximum stability and support.
I don't have any photos of them, but there are also a range of leather ballet slippers i've been painting using the Angelus and EcoFlow lines of leather paints. Tarrago is another brand of paints formulated expressly for flexible leather footwear.
Hope you enjoyed this brief foray into ballet shoe craftwork! I sure have appreciated the opportunity to be involved in it myself.