The Confluence of The Experience of Pain and Beauty In Ballet Through The Aesthetics Marking of Pointe Shoes

Abstract

Ballet is notable for its beautiful, mystical, celestial, weightless, and effortless movements. However, for ballet dancers, these beautiful movements are all done by a body in pain, a body that embeds memories and social codes of its structure. The active involvement of the body enables a ballet dancer to develop a habitus that constantly naturalizes pain as part of the process of its “Being.” For the female, pain is embodied in pointe shoes. Initially, pointe shoes were meant to enhance the female’s beauty, like fairies or angels in fairy tales. The encounter with pain, then, marginalizes and abjects the dancer into her semiotic chora. Through the layering of theories of Angela Pickard and Julia Kristeva, this paper explores female ballet dancers’ lived experiences of pain and abjection, represented through pointe shoes. Literature research and reviews, as well as interviews, were analyzed with Arianna Maiorani’s kinesemiotics method to put a rise to the dancer’s personal meanings, from the semiotics to symbolics, marked through body movements in interaction with space. The confluence of signs represented in pointe shoes creates a holistic meaning, namely the aesthetics of sublimated pain.