Chapter Three: Up On Your Toes 🦶😭

Right. We need to talk about the single most unhinged decision in the entire history of dance, and I say this as someone who does it five times a week and has the toenails — or, let’s be honest, the LACK of toenails — to prove it. At some point, ballerinas looked at normal dancing and went: what if we did all of that, but balancing on the very tips of our toes? And everyone agreed this was a brilliant idea. It was not brilliant. Iconic maybe. But definitely not brilliant. 💅

This all kicked off in the early 1800s, in a stretch of time everyone calls the Romantic era — and no, not romance like Valentine’s Day, although there is plenty of tragic doomed love, don’t you worry. “Romantic” here means it was all about feelings, dreams, moonlight, nature, magic, and beautiful sad things. After all that stiff, tidy, royal French court stuff, people suddenly wanted ballet to be mysterious and emotional and just a little bit spooky. FINALLY. 🌙

And the woman who defined the whole era was called Marie Taglioni. In 1832, in Paris, she danced in a ballet called La Sylphide — choreographed, adorably, by her own dad, Filippo — in which she played a sylph, which is basically a magical fairy-spirit creature that a normal human man falls in love with (it does not end well for anyone💀; it never does). And to make herself look otherworldly, like she was floating and barely touching the earth at all, Marie rose right up onto the tips of her toes. 🧚

Now, people had risen onto their toes before her — I’m not going to lie to you and pretend she pressed a magic button no one had ever pressed. But Taglioni did it so beautifully, so lightly, so exactly-like-an-actual-ghost, that she made it THE thing. She turned pointe work into something that meant something — not a circus trick, but the way you show a creature that isn’t quite human, that belongs to the air and the moonlight. After her, every ballerina on earth wanted to do it. Pointe was here to stay.

And here is where I need you to feel deeply sorry for her, and honestly for all of us. Do you know what her “pointe shoes” actually were? Satin slippers. That’s it. Soft little satin slippers that she sewed around the toe to make them a tiny bit stiffer. No box. No hard tip. No support at all. She was standing her entire body weight on her bare toes inside a fancy sock. 🧦😭 The pointe shoes I wear today have a hard reinforced tip AND I still sometimes cry. She had a sock. A SOCK. Women were built different back then, I fear.

The look of Romantic ballet is a whole vibe, and you’ve definitely seen it somewhere: the long, floaty, white, bell-shaped skirt — that’s called the Romantic tutu (the short stick-out pancake one comes later, we’ll get there, calm down). Pale girls in white, in the moonlight, being tragic and ethereal. Theatres had just started using gas lighting, so for the first time they could actually dim the lights and make everything look misty and dreamy and haunted. Peak halloween atmosphere. 👻

The other massive Romantic ballet — and this one we STILL perform constantly, it’s an absolute all-timer — is Giselle, from 1841, again in Paris, with music by a man called Adolphe Adam and a gorgeous dancer named Carlotta Grisi in the lead. Quick summary, because it is SO dramatic: sweet peasant girl Giselle falls madly in love with a boy, discovers he’s a lying nobleman who’s already engaged to someone else, and then literally dies of a broken heart at the end of Act One. 💔

Then comes Act Two — and THIS is why I love it — where Giselle becomes one of the Wilis: a squad of ghost girls who were all betrayed by men in life and now haunt the forest at night, forcing any man they catch to dance until he DROPS DEAD from exhaustion. Iconic, frankly. An entire vengeful girl-ghost dance gang — honestly? kind of badass. 💅 But Giselle, even as a ghost, still loves her stupid boy so much that she protects him and saves his life. It’s tragic, it’s stunning, it makes grown adults sob. Bombastic side eye to the boy, though. What an absolute loser. 😒

Now for the fun part, because it’s not ALL ghosts and heartbreak. Ballerinas in this era became absolute megastars — like, screaming-fans, celebrity, blackpink famous. There was even a legendary rivalry between elegant, ethereal Marie Taglioni and a spicier, earthier, flirtier dancer called Fanny Elssler, and people would pick SIDES like it was a football team. Team Taglioni versus Team Elssler. The original fandom war. 🥊

And this brings me to possibly my favourite story in the whole book, and I have to be honest with you about it: it might not be completely true. But it is SO good that I have to tell you anyway. The story goes that when Taglioni retired, a group of her superfans over in Russia were so obsessed with her that they paid a huge amount of money for a pair of her old pointe shoes… and then cooked them… and ATE them. 🍽️ At a fancy dinner. With a sauce. Apparently prepared as a fricassée (a sort of posh stew). They ate her SHOES because they loved her that much.

Now. Historians reckon this is probably a legend. But the fact that this was even a rumour people were willing to believe tells you EVERYTHING about how insanely famous these dancers were. Girls today have posters. Those people apparently had a menu. 💀 I would like to state, for the record and for my own safety, that I do not want anyone to eat my shoes. Frame them, maybe. Eat them, absolutely not.

So: the Romantic era handed ballerinas the power (pointe), the fame (megastardom), and the feelings (all that gorgeous, sobbing tragedy). It swung the spotlight firmly onto women — up on their toes, floating and haunting and breaking hearts. It was a MASSIVE glow-up from the tidy French court.

But the country that was about to take ALL of this — the pointe, the feelings, the ghost stories, the big swelling orchestras — and turn it into the most spectacular, most emotional, most jaw-dropping ballets the world had ever seen? Oh, you know exactly who it is. You’ve known since chapter one. It’s Russia. Turn the page and let me GUSH. 🇷🇺👑