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Prosthetics in Performance: Exploring the Relationship Between Ballet Dancers and Their Pointe Shoes

Dassler, Georgia E
Abstract
Getting her first pair of pointe shoes is an important milestone for a young ballet dancer. From then on, throughout her ballet “career” (whether she becomes a professional or not), her pointe shoes will play an important role in shaping her dancing and her physical form. Ballet’s strict aesthetic requirements demand visually long body lines. Pointe shoes are uniquely able to meet those demands by augmenting and extending a dancer’s physical body. Through choosing, personalizing, training with, and eventually “killing” pointe shoes, dancers incorporate the footwear as prosthetic extensions of their own bodies and intentions. As a result, prosthetic pointe shoes play an integral role in the performative and objectifying realities of ballet dance.
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2017-05-01
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Undergraduate Honors Theses
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Ellie_Dassler_Final_Thesis.pdf
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Weiss, Brad
Glasser, Jonathan
Cochrane, Leslie
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Anthropology
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https://scholarworks.wm.edu/handle/internal/10505
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