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Tips For Preparing Your Pointe Shoes for Summer Ballet Intensives

An exciting summer of dancing is in store for many dancers this year with summer ballet intensives right around the corner. Intensives are a great way to challenge oneself, try new skills, meet new people, and experience different ballet styles. They are also called “intensives” for a reason, as dancers are typically dancing hours a day for weeks on end, sometimes in different states. At Dancewear Center, we want to make sure our customers are prepared for an exciting summer of dancing by providing them with the tips and supplies they need to be successful.

By Madison Huizinga, DWC Blog Editor

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg from Unsplash

An important part of preparing for summer ballet intensives is making sure your pointe shoes are prepared for long hours of dancing. Pointe shoes only last about 10-20 dancing hours on average. It’s helpful for dancers to take steps to prolong the life of their shoes, as dancing in dead shoes can have adverse effects on foot and ankle health. For instance, dancing in dead pointe shoes with little support overloads dancers’ joints and can change their center of gravity, which can make force unevenly distributed and excessively load the front of dancers’ feet. This can put dancers’ feet and ankles at risk for stress fractures, bunions, and more harmful injuries in the long run. See: “The Dangers of Dancing on Dead Pointe Shoes” by Dance Magazine

So, how can dancers prolong the life of their pointe shoes to prepare for upcoming summer ballet intensives?

Rotate Multiple Pairs of Shoes

Firstly, dancers can rotate their pointe shoes to keep them lasting longer. To do this, dancers can purchase multiple pairs of their pointe shoes, sew them, and alternate the ones they wear each day. It’s helpful to take into account the average lifespan of a pointe shoe (10-20 dancing hours) when determining how many pointe shoes one should bring to a summer ballet intensive.

Prepare for the Environment

Secondly, take into account the location where your summer ballet intensive will be held. In more humid environments, pointe shoes tend to die at faster rates. Considering pointe shoes are essentially made of layers of paper/cardboard and paste, exposing them to hot environments with high levels of moisture in the air will cause them to deteriorate quicker. So, if your summer intensive is located in some of the hotter and more humid areas of the United States, like Florida, Louisiana, or Hawaii, you may want to consider bringing along more pairs of pointe shoes to rotate throughout the intensive.

Dry Out Your Shoes

In addition, it’s helpful to dry out your pointe shoes when you’re not dancing in them to help slow their deterioration. One of the best ways to do this is not to leave your worn pointe shoes in your dance bag after class when you’re not wearing them. This creates a “sauna effect,” exposing your shoes to a stuffy, humid environment that can cause them to break down faster. When you’re not wearing your pointe shoes, take them out of your dance bag, don’t fold them inside one another, and lay them out to dry (it can take pointe shoes 48-72 hours to fully dry out!). When transporting pointe shoes to the studio, putting them in a mesh bag can help them aerate and keep them out of direct sunlight to prevent further deterioration. It’s also important to not leave pointe shoes in a car or any other environment that isn’t climate controlled.

Strategically Use Reinforcing Agents

There are some products you can purchase alongside your pointe shoes that will help extend their shelf life: one of which is Jet Glue. Where to apply Jet Glue varies slightly among dancers; however, the most common placement is on the outside and inside of the shoe’s shank, covering 1.5-2 inches where the arch breaks. Some dancers also put it on either side of the shank and in the box of their shoes. Before applying Jet Glue to your pointe shoes, we recommend consulting with a DWC fitter to see how you can best apply it to maximize the shoe’s support and integrity for your unique needs.

Schedule a Pointe Shoe Fitting

It’s especially important for dancers to touch base with a fitter before and/or during their summer intensives to ensure that they’re taking the best possible pointe shoes and products with them to help them feel supported. To prep for intensives, DWC fitters will ask dancers where their intensives are taking place, how their current shoes are breaking down, whether the intensive is requiring certain pointe shoes, how many pairs of shoes the dancer should bring, and more. DWC fitters can also help evaluate how dancers’ shoes are breaking down, recommend where to apply reinforcement agents like Jet Glue, and make sewing suggestions to help maximize the pointe shoe’s performance. Dancers can also discuss what their intensive workload will look like so fitters can potentially recommend different shoes for different activities, as some loads might require shoes with a harder or softer shank, for example.

Importantly, due to unfavorable supply chain circumstances, stock in some pointe shoe styles is limited. That’s why we recommend that dancers have backup options to assure they have shoes to take with them to the intensives.

Schedule an Injury Risk Prevention Appointment with a Dance Medicine Specialist

Finally, it’s important that dancers are aware of any potential injury flare-ups that could come up when dancing long hours. For example, master pointe shoe fitter Josephine Lee of ThePointeShop says that issues like tendonitis can flare up during summer intensives because of the added workload on the feet. We recommend visiting a dance medicine specialist before heading to your summer intensive, as specialists can conduct body assessments, analyze what physical challenges you’ve been experiencing, which problems may potentially flare up, and give a specific plan to follow to help mitigate the risk of injury. Check out our dance medical specialists page on our website to find specialists in your area!

Summer intensives can be enriching experiences for dancers of all ages and technique levels. What makes them even more successful for dancers is ensuring that their pointe shoes are in the best condition they can be to support dancers’ feet. Be sure to book your pointe shoe fitting appointments at DWC today. Happy intensive season!

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Laying the Groundwork for Legacy

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that since 2020 hit, my construct of time has been distorted into a brand new reality… one where each day, week, month, and year seems to blend together. Every year, I look forward to carving out time to reflect on the past year and write my review of our accomplishments; however, this year I’ve been dragging my feet, mostly because 2021 has felt more like the third book in a long series than a stand-alone novel.

2021 in Review

By Samantha Weissbach, DWC Owner & General Manager

To fully understand why 2021 was such a pivotal year in the DWC story, we have to go back in time for additional context. When my mom and I took over ownership of DWC in late 2018, my sole desire was to keep a longstanding resource for the community alive. Despite my passion, I knew we would be taking on a huge learning curve, not only in taking over a retail business (when the bulk of my business operations experience is in services) but also in maintaining and building on the level of fitting expertise previously provided at DWC.

As with most things in the dance world, there is no universal standard set in place for fitting pointe shoes, and when I took over DWC, a comprehensive curriculum for learning how to fit simply did not exist. Pointe shoes can bear up to 10-14 times your body weight, and incorrectly fitting or dead shoes can open dancers up to a litany of mild to severe injuries. Establishing an agreed-upon standard and methodology for fitting pointe shoes would not only provide a more concrete career path to becoming a pointe shoe fitter, but would more importantly give ballet dancers a champion in their efforts to dance longer, stronger, and safer. In our first 2 years of ownership, the staff and I sought out every possible resource we could find for fitting pointe shoes, but it simply wasn’t enough.

“Thank you for choosing to spend so much of your finite life energy with DWC - I truly could not and would not want to do this without each and every one of you by my side.”

We all know that 2020 was a year that will go down in every history book. It was a monumental event for humanity, and no business was left unaffected (whether it be positively or negatively). In the first couple of months of the shutdown, like most of us - I was left alone with myself and my thoughts. Even before the pandemic hit, my efforts to seek out higher-level education & mentorship were fruitless. It turns out it’s especially hard to find anyone willing (understandably so) to part with their trade secrets in a business as niche as pointe shoe fitting.

I was feeling dejected and hopeless and by May of 2020, like most businesses, I was seriously considering closing our doors for good. Our sales were in the toilet (we now have a good chuckle when we look at our April 2020 sales - a whopping $103.29 for the entire month), we were locked into our Fall ordering* of over $100k in product (a conservative order) that was likely not going to sell, and the SBA loans we did receive simply weren’t going to cover even our most base level operating costs.

*In most retail, inventory orders are done in bulk, on a seasonal basis, oftentimes months in advance. It isn’t unusual to purchase for September in February, April in November, etc.

For those who know me, you know that while I hold a deep reverence for people and their beliefs, I personally do not subscribe to a specific religion. I do, however, believe in energy. I believe matter cannot be created nor destroyed and I believe that humans, as a species, are incredibly limited in what we are capable of perceiving. Call it an ill-advised business strategy, but in 2020 I was looking for a clear sign from The Universe on whether or not I should keep going.

Enter ThePointeShop (TPS) and their release of The Progressive Pointe Method curriculum. I vividly remember the day Josephine announced she was opening applications for the fitter certification course and retail partnerships. My heart started racing, and I immediately started sweating profusely (I’m a sweater. Cute, I know.) I could feel it in my bones that this was the sign I had been waiting for, and this was the opportunity for the mentorship and training I so desperately had been seeking out. I told my mom the day we applied that if we weren’t accepted into the program and as retail partners, that would be my sign that it was time for DWC to close its doors.

Fast forward to today, January 20th, 2022 as I write to you from the plane taking me to San Diego to take my final test to become a TPS certified pointe shoe fitter. By now it’s no secret that we’ve not closed our doors, and that I’ve had the great honor of spending the last year in training with Josephine herself. I will forever be grateful to Josephine and her entire team for caring so deeply about progressing the dance industry that they made the unpopular decision to train fitters outside of their organization with the larger goal of elevating the craft of pointe shoe fitting on an international level. This seemingly small action had a ripple effect and gave us the sign we needed to press forward in a time when I had lost hope.

As I look back on 2021, I know it’s going to be a year that marks a huge milestone in the history of our business. We grew our small team of 4 into a team of 14, became members of DanseMedica and retail partners with ThePointeShop, traveled to Juneau, AK to fit pointe shoes, and of course - opened our 2nd location in Renton, WA. Our blog (headed by our amazing editor Madison Huizinga) has published a total of 76 posts, highlighting local artists and dance specialists, and subjects such as dancer mental health, injury risk prevention, and epilepsy awareness. We’ve also begun hosting regular networking events and educational seminars out of the event space in our Renton location, and of course, we provided multiple internal and external training opportunities for our staff.

None of this would have been possible without mentorship from ThePointeShop, the continued support of our customers (y'all are ‘the real MVPs’), my husband (aka the DWC dad: he fixes and builds everything - including the beautiful pointe shoe tree at our Renton location) and especially: the extraordinary members of my team at DWC. You all inspire me, keep me in line when I’ve gone off the deep end (it’s a more frequent occurrence than you might think - just ask Riley), and infuse the DWC mission and culture with such authentic passion and care. Thank you for choosing to spend so much of your finite life energy with DWC - I truly could not and would not want to do this without each and every one of you by my side.

While we have far from recovered from the financial loss of 2020, I am confident that we have laid the groundwork for a legacy of building community in the Seattle dance scene that will hopefully carry on long after I’m gone. There is still a great amount of uncertainty and unease in the air; however, I am certain of this: when a community rallies together, so much is possible. Here’s to all of us, 2022, and the joy and love still to come!

About Samantha