It is amazing how seeing, hearing or smelling something can suddenly evoke long-lost forgotten memories. This happened to a friend of mine recently when she was on a weekend break in Budapest, Hungary. While wandering down one of the city’s many shopping streets, her eyes were suddenly drawn to a pair of ballet shoes sitting in one of the shop windows. Upon seeing the ballet shoes she was transported in an instant to another time and another place entirely.
The story begins in war torn Germany, where her mother was born. She was a Jew living in Berlin and was still only 15 years old when she was taken to a concentration camp along with her mother and father. As they were taken from their home, my friend’s mother grabbed a pair of ballet shoes that she had been given by her parents for her birthday just a few days before. When they reached the concentration camp she was separated from her mum and dad, so for the next few years she kept those ballet shoes with her at all times as a constant reminder of her missing parents.
The fact that she managed to keep the ballet shoes hidden from her captors became a source of great hope for her, instilling a deep belief that she would see her parents again one day. Sure enough, when the war was over, they were reunited and eventually resettled in England, where she kept those ballet shoes as a constant reminder of what hope and belief can achieve in times of great despair.
My friend had never known about her mother’s ballet shoes until she passed away. It was only while going through her mother’s belongings after her death that she found the ballet shoes along with a diary, which told the story of how they had helped her survive the Holocaust. My friend vowed to keep them safe forever and pass them on to her own children, to keep the story of her mother’s life alive. Tragically, just a few months later there was a terrible fire at my friend’s house. Almost everything was destroyed, including the ballet shoes and the diary. Of course, the insurance covered most of the damage, but there was no amount of money that could ever replace those ballet shoes.
Understandably, whenever my friend sees a pair of ballet shoes now she gets quite upset, but on this occasion in Budapest there was something different. The ballet shoes in the shop window were really old and almost identical to her mother’s. The moment she saw them she knew she had to buy them. When she went into the shop and started asking questions about them, it turned out they had belonged to an old German ballet dancer who was famous for having survived the Holocaust. The ballet shoes were very expensive but it did not matter, as soon as my friend bought them she knew had reclaimed just a little bit of her mother’s life.
For further information regarding our range of ballet shoes, please visit our website at http://www.dancedirect.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a little something about a topic very near and dear to my heart. That topic is ballet shoes. These are shoes that you wear when you dance ballet. They’re vital to the art of ballet dancing, because without shoes it would hardly be an art at all, just moving around on a floor and kicking your legs into the air. But thanks to the presence of ballet shoes, the form is elevated into the rarified place it currently holds in the contemporary artistic and cultural world.
I once had to purchase a pair of ballet shoes for my niece, who was desperate to become a ballerina after watching a movie in which a ballerina (wearing ballet shoes, of course) danced in front of a king and queen and was selected to become a princess. Everyone in my family decided to purchase for the young girl a different piece of the ballet ensemble, and I was tasked with the purchase of the ballet shoes, so that she would be able to dance and pay proper respect to the medium as an art form.
It was during this process that I learned a great deal about the construction and traditions surrounding ballet shoes, and this information is so fascinating to me that I feel compelled now to convey it to you. Did you know that men wear white ballet shoes, and women wear pink ballet shoes? It’s true, and it is a custom that dates back to the earliest days of ballet, perhaps even to the time in which that young ballerina performed in front of the king and queen to become a princess, and so inspired my young niece to attempt to become a dancer herself. Yes, women wear pink ballet shoes and men wear white, except sometimes they both wear tan shoes, which makes it look like they’re wearing no ballet shoes at all. But they are, so it remains art.
This is not the only interesting fact about ballet shoes that I am excited to be sharing with you now. In addition to the color, the material with which the ballet shoes are constructed can vary, but not according to gender – rather, ballet shoes vary in material based on how expensive the shoes are. Some are made of leather and some are made of canvas, but the most important thing about a good pair of ballet shoes is that the sole remains thin and flexible, because people have to dance in them, and it’s really hard to dance properly in shoes that don’t have a thin and flexible sole. This is why the soles of ballet shoes are thin and flexible.
Now that you’ve learned a bit more about ballet shoes, I hope that you understand why this is a subject that is so important to me personally. In case you were wondering, my niece did not stick with ballet and is not a ballerina anymore, although it is not because the ballet shoes I bought for her weren’t good enough. She eventually outgrew them, however, and she was not all that graceful anyway.