00:12
What have I been up to in this past few weeks that we haven't spoken?
Right.
Oh, I restarted pointe shoes in ballet.
Do you know what they are?
No, just the, I mean, the picture you sent me.
Yeah, I have that kind of really basic knowledge.
But I thought that, you know, you have to wear it all the time when you practice.
But that's not the case.
That's not true.
No, it's not.
So it's, I mean, if you are going for a professional route, yes, you wear them at every class.
But, you know, ever since I switched to hobby ballet, I, other than some performances I've done,
I have basically stopped wearing pointe shoes because ballet is hard enough without pointe shoes, first of all.
So what do you wear then?
Okay, let me bring a pair of pointe shoes to you.
I mean, podcast people cannot see this, but at least you can.
Yeah.
So, so they look like this.
Okay, yeah.
It's a pink satin shoes with ribbons on it.
Yeah, yeah.
Much like how people describe, you know, people think about when they think about ballet and ballet shoes.
Yeah, yeah.
This is really hard.
Oh, okay.
So this is the toe part.
Yeah.
And if, imagine my hand is your feet and it goes on like this.
And then you try to manipulate the movement with your feet.
I see, I see, yeah.
And in my case, I am wearing a Gaynor-Minden model, which is a type of ballet, like, it's a company that makes, one of the many companies that makes this shoes.
What makes them special is that instead of having leather to have this hard exterior, they have synthetic material.
So in here, like the sole of the shoe is this like bendy plastic material.
And that's what's supporting my weight when I go on pointe.
On pointe means I go on the floor.
If this is a floor, then I go like this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, it's, as you can imagine, it's extremely uncomfortable to wear.
03:03
Yeah, it looks uncomfortable.
And you use these ribbons.
They're not just for like prettiness, but it's actually to secure your ankle so that, you know, when your feet are going up and down using the shoes, your ankles are protected.
And they, so, so these come in different, like different length here.
This is called vamp.
The length between, yeah, like length of your toe coverage part is called vamp.
And some people like it longer.
Some people like it shorter.
The platform, which is like the tip of this toe, like how big this toe part is.
You can also decide?
Yeah, like you can customize it.
You can customize the hardness of the shank, which is the back part.
You can customize how hard your material is on the back of the feet.
You can obviously customize like the width, how long, like how wide or how skinny.
And also my shank is 3 4th shank.
So like only up to this part, the 75% of my shoe is hard and the heel part is actually quite soft.
So I can bend it like this.
Yeah.
And I also put elastics on, like gomo tsuketerun dakedo, just to help with extra security more than just the ribbons.
And basically every ballet dancers want different shoes and slightly different customizations.
So different companies make so many different kinds of shoes.
But no, it's not necessary to wear them every time the class happens, because this is kind of like a performance.
It's for performance and it's also like a kind of, it shows you a certain dedication level.
It shows you that you have trained long enough, first of all, to be able to wear these shoes.
Because you cannot wear these shoes on like your first day of ballet.
You need to really train long time, long and hard to strengthen your feet.
Because basically you need to manipulate this like hard, like almost, you can probably hurt a person if you like smack them with this.
Because it's so hard and it'll be probably pretty painful.
But so it takes a while to be able to even wear it properly.
Yeah, to be able to even wear them.
And to do that for regular classes is, it's kind of like it adds a whole nother level of difficulties to your training.
06:14
So for me as a hobby dancer who mostly don't perform, I don't need to be practicing pointe shoes.
I mean, I generally, I never thought I would go back to pointe shoes ever really after I started doing this for fun.
Because it's, yeah, it's kind of like,
Really? Wow.
It's that big, it's that big.
So like, because it's so painful, you know, your, your toes are gonna, your toenails are gonna be like dead half the time.
You're gonna have so many mame, and tako, and uonome, and like blisters all the time.
Your feet are probably going to be deformed, you know, if you wear them too much.
And because imagine like you are like, that's like 50, 60 kilogram human.
Standing on the, yeah, on your toes like this, right?
Standing on tiptoes. Yeah, and still need to look graceful.
Yeah, and you're gonna jump.
Yeah, and you're gonna jump and turn and, you know, do all kinds of things with it.
And it's, it's a lot of damage to your feet system.
And, and honestly, to me, at least when I was doing this in a serious way, it kind of sucked out the joy of dancing because it was so painful.
Like, I think that was the time when I started to feel like, ooh, like dancing is not just fun.
It could be super painful.
It could be very painful.
And I, and my, I feel like when I started it, which was when I was like maybe 10, 11?
No, maybe younger than that, actually.
Like maybe I was nine or something.
When I started getting them, I don't think my body was ready.
I don't think, I don't think I was strong enough.
But somehow my ballet teacher thought that it's a good time for me to start training on these pointe shoes.
And I also were like, like, I am so much better dancer without these.
But like, you know, at that time, you're like dream of getting this permission from your teacher to be like, okay, you may wear the pointe shoes.
It's like you like unlock the next level.
09:01
And like many other ballet kids, I slept together with my pointe shoes the very first night I got them from my teacher.
And like, like, it's, it's such a special, like symbolic moment.
You know, it's like what makes you like a big girl ballerina and not just like a kid ballerina.
But like, yeah, quickly, it got like really kind of like the reason why I hate dancing, you know.
So I, I had a bit of mixed feeling about it.
I also stopped performing, you know, after I quit ballet professional, like pre-professional training.
So I had no reason.
Yeah, what made you, you know, come back to the pointe shoes?
So good question. Because I, so I've been, you know, it's been my sort of like post PhD project to sort of retrain my body and to be performance ready.
Like I wanted to do a couple, maybe a handful performances before I fully put my performing days behind me.
I don't know why I felt that way, but I did.
And that's why I'm doing my gym workout and taking regular dance classes.
Right. Like these are all not just to be healthy in general, which is also important.
But like, this is all part of my project, my personal passion project of getting back, getting me back on stage.
And like I, yes, like I could just like sign up to perform on stage, you know, for fun.
But I wanted to be a certain level of standard if it was going to be a performance.
And then my friend asked me, Asami, there's going to be a few of us are getting together to rent a stage to do, you know, and each of us will prepare a solo or a small piece.
And yeah, like, are you interested, basically?
And I was like, oh, like, is this like this is earlier than I planned.
Like my project, you know, my passion project was in a span of like a few years.
I didn't think it was going to happen this quickly.
But like both the friend that asked me and also my other dance friend, Kaori, who you heard on the podcast, were also like, do it, do it now.
Like, you know, what's stopping you?
And it's true.
Like, you know, I most likely will be unhappy with the performance.
Anyway, like the first performance pack, just like your first experiment, it's never going to be perfect.
12:04
Right.
But I feel like let's say I have 10 more years of good performance days.
Right.
Which is pretty realistic, because ballet is just too demanding.
And I don't want to put out a level of performance where it's, like, just for fun.
Like, if I'm performing, I want it to be a certain level and a certain standard.
So let's say I have 10 more years.
How many performance can I realistically do?
And I would definitely need to try out a couple of times before I feel like I can enjoy being on stage again.
Like, I need, like, a little bit of rehab performance, I think.
Yeah.
So the sort of key ball of this performance and the level of things I need to prepare seemed small enough that I feel like I could.
But to do that, I think, I mean, I have a choice to not perform it on point.
But I figure that this is a good sort of external motivation to make me go back on point.
I'm looking forward to, you know, attending one of your performances in Japan, maybe in the future, right?
Well, so this one is actually happening in Japan.
What? Really?
Then I should go, I should.
Oh, gosh, I should go watch you dance then.
Definitely.
You have to tell me when and where.
I don't know.
After the podcast.
I don't know, but maybe not this one.
Maybe the next one or something.
What?
That's why I really have no clue.
You gotta keep it secret.
I have no clue.
The last time I performed anything is when I was undergrad.
And the last time I performed classical ballet is even more before that.
I think it's like high school.
It's okay.
I'm gonna be sitting in around the first row and in the middle part.
I don't even know if it's open to the audience, honestly.
What? No, of course it is.
It probably is, exactly.
But yeah, we'll see.
The performance is a few months away, so I still have some time.
But I have a long way to go to rehab my strength, my foot strength.
Don't get hurt, though.
15:01
Yeah, that's definitely number one thing.
I am gonna work hard, but I am not going to injure myself.
And I hopefully know where that line is.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
