At the Atlantic, science historial Suzanne Fischer has an interesting post about the development of pointe shoes. In the early 20th century, at a time when all sorts of technologies were remaking the way people lived, worked, and played, pointe shoes were doing the same thing for ballerinas.
Ballet pointe shoes are not typically thought of as technological artifacts, but they certainly are. But, as Whitney Laemmli of the University of Pennsylvania argued at the Society for the History of Technology conference in Cleveland over the weekend, ballet’s technology doesn’t end there: The bodies of dancers reshaped by pointe shoes are also technological. Laemmli’s paper, “A Case in Pointe: Making Streamlined Bodies and Interchangeable Ballerinas at the New York City Ballet,” looks at the way George Balanchine used pointe shoes to remake the bodies of his dancers into interchangeable machines.
via Boing Boing
Image: get the pointe III, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from chrishaysphotography’s photostream
