Grier Cooper

Conjure up an image of ballerinas spinning effortlessly en pointe and you’re not likely to come up with, say blisters… or corns… or bunions. Yet the two go hand-in-hand like peanut butter and jelly. Regardless of the shape of one’s feet, though, the show must go on and every dancer if eventually faced with the unfortunate and painful prospect of having to dance with bloody toes.

There are work-arounds, of course. There have to be. That’s where a dancer’s best friend comes to the rescue: good old Dr. Scholl’s. No, they don’t just make arch supports and sandals that are the equivalent of wooden flip-flops (but comfy!). Many dancers rely heavily on Dr. Scholl’s Blister Treatment, Corn Cushions (and remover), bunion cushions, and Moleskin Padding to protect wounds and sore spots when the going gets tough and the tough must keep going.

Every time I put on my pointe shoes, whether for class, rehearsal or performance, there was an elaborate ritual involved (which had nothing to do with the preparation of the pointe shoes… this part was all about the feet). It would be professional suicide to just stick your unprotected feet into a pair of pointe shoes and dance so long and hard that you give the 12 Dancing Princesses a run for their money. Instead, there is a process. What worked well for me was to wrap each toe with medical tape and then use paper towels or gel pads to make the whole experience more comfy. I dealt with the occasional corn (man, those suckers are painful!) by dosing it with remover and by using an oval-shaped corn pad to relieve pressure.

I was one of the lucky one who got blisters on very rare occasions… until I moved to Miami to dance with Miami City Ballet.

Miami is commonly acknowledged to be a part of the Continental US, but the climate (and the culture) is tropical by nature. It’s warm year-round, which brings tourists and older folks in droves and its monsoon season (typically in July/August) would rival that of Mumbai, India, Bali, Indonesia or anywhere else that gets pelted with driving rains so fierce that even with the windshield wipers on high it would be lunacy to attempt driving.

Miami is also humid as h*ll… which means blisters. Lots of them.

My time in Miami was the first and only time in my life when I had blisters all the time. The tropical climate kept everything perpetually moist and feet were no exception. Every day brought on new and disgusting terrors and no matter how hard I tried to stay on top of it, I got more and more blisters.

I even had blisters on top of my blisters.

But the winning moment came one night when we were on tour in Palm Beach. I was putting the final touches on makeup and costuming, attempting to delay the inevitable moment when I’d have to put my bloody toes in pointe shoes and dance my part in Concerto Baroco.

For the record, Concerto Barocco is a beautiful Balanchine ballet set to Concerto in D minor for Two Violins, by Johann Sebastian Bach (achingly wonderful music). It is also one of Balanchine’s most taxing ballets for the corps de ballet. During the entire 20 minutes of the ballet, the corps never leaves the stage. The first movement is brisk and uptempo, followed by a second movement that is quite slow where the dancers are forced to hold static lunge positions for many long minutes at a time.

But the end of the ballet is a real killer; it is fast-paced, technically demanding, relentlessly aerobic and in its final moments, there are a million soutenu turns from side to side and endless hops on pointe.

In essence, it might be the worst possible ballet to perform with a nasty collection of gaping blisters.

When life passes us incredibly painful moments, sometimes there’s no choice but to belly up to the bar(re). Which is what I did. After painstakingly cutting out moleskin pads that were perfectly-sized for each and every blister, I wrapped every toe carefully, cushioned the whole mess with padding and said a silent prayer before heading backstage to psyche myself into the proper mindset to get through the performance.

First I tried some pique arabesques. Those were tolerable. If you’re comfortable with the feeling of having your foot pierced by a red-hot poker. The soutenu turns stepped things up a few notches. The hops on pointe were worse than natural childbirth (I know from personal experience) so I stopped doing them. After that I stayed off pointe and kept my muscles warm until the final moment of reckoning arrived.

A taste of Concerto Barocco:

But when the music started, it transported me away from my worldly troubles… at least for the first two movements. Some music is inspiring enough that it can do that, force us to forget the things we’d rather forget and let our bodies simply respond to the exquisite sound of a musical masterpiece. Add the theatrical elements of bright light, a company of fellow dancers and an enrapt audience and the pain disappears… almost.

Except for the third movement and those bloody (literally) hops on pointe where I could feel the raw meat of my wounded flesh grinding against the concrete confines that were the boxes of my shoes… well, that was special.

Final bows were one of the hugest reliefs I’ve ever experienced. I walked off stage- okay, no- I hobbled. When I looked down I noticed blood had seeped through everything, including the pink satin exteriors of my shoes. Now that was serious.

Such is a day in the life of a dancer.

Once I had purchased my first pair of pointe shoes, the steep uphill climb of the learning curve began. There was a lot to learn: how to sew on the ribbons, care for the shoes, care for the feet in and out of the shoes and, of course, how to use the things. But during the course of the drive home from the dance store, the shoes remained nestled in their box in a mass of tissue paper.

Within moments after getting them home I was ready to sew on the ribbons and give them a test-drive. Proper ribbon placement is essential; one cannot just sew them on haphazardly and hope for the best. To find the right placement, fold down the back of the shoe until it touches the shank on the inside of the shoe. The sites where the satin folds are where the ribbons go. My teacher was very particular and very thorough about sewing those ribbons; she made us fold the ends of the ribbon over on themselves twice before sewing them on. By sewing through several layers of ribbon, there was no way those puppies were ever going to rip off in the middle of something important.

At last we were able to try them out the following week. The final 10 minutes of class were set aside for the pointe shoe fledglings to spread their wings. We were given careful instructions on how to gently bend the shanks so they would curve under our arches and how to break in the boxes so they felt a little bit less like cement blocks. We ripped off a hunk of lamb’s wool (sold by the box), wrapped it around the toes to cushion them, then tied the ribbons in the trademark criss-cross around the ankles.

The first exercise on pointe was simple relevés on two legs, and we only did a few of them. It felt strange and rather anti-climactic. It also hurt. A lot.

Over the next several months we began to build up to doing more and more en pointe and I simultaneously began to have more and more pain in my feet, specifically in the joints of my big toes. Whenever I took my pointe shoes off, my feet would throb in protest, the joints of angry and red. I began to notice they were becoming enlarged. Needless to say, the pain and disfigurement were alarming. I tried putting ice on the affected area but it didn’t help – they kept growing.

I would come to find that nothing would help. Over the course of the many years that followed, my feet would gradually transform themselves into a twisted version of themselves. “The problem is that you need to strengthen the outside muscles of your calves,” said the podiatrist that I consulted (hundreds of exercises later there was no change). “The problem is that your big toes are longer than the others and your foot is warping itself to compensate,” said knowing friends (not much to be done about that). The problem continued to progress and I developed full-fledged bunions (really not pretty).

The real problem was that pointe shoes are actually instruments of torture. Beautiful to look at, but not so fun to get used to.

It took years before the breath-taking pain finally subsided. But for the first few years that I wore pointe shoes, it felt like my feet were being sliced with a hot knife. I’d often have to slip the shoes off for a few moments between exercise to relieve the continual aching pressure. When I finally took them off at the end of class I expected to see steam come pouring out, like in cartoons. Only it was no laughing matter, really. Most of the time I wanted to cry.

I had yet to learn how to dance with open, bloody blisters and to familiarize myself with the wide array of Dr. Scholl’s products that make a dancer’s life just that much more bearable. It wasn’t until years later in New York that I’d learn the tricks of mummifying my toes with medical tape and strategically placing squishy pads around nasty blisters and corns.

Human feet are subjected to a lot but dancers pretty much take the prize for being the most demanding of them.

Two summers ago, a fellow dancer and I were walking together. It was a hot day and I was wearing flip-flops. My friend happened to look down at my feet and commented,”Oh, your poor feet. Look at what pointe shoes have done them.” Her feet, by contrast, looked totally normal and pretty (I was envious).

In the overall scope of things, one could argue that I got off easy. Yes, my feet are somewhat deformed, but I never ripped, tweaked or broke anything. While many dancers end up with injuries that never completely go away, I never suffered anything that still lives with me now.

But in the ballet world, such is the price of glory.

My Feet

Normal Feet Photo: Shannah Pace

Grier Cooper

the writer in a dancer's body

Tag Archives: Dr. Scholl’s

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