What do people think of arch enhancers? I didn't even know they existed but I guess they are worn to give the illusion of extremely arched feet for dancers who aren't Svetlana Zakharova or Sylvie Guillem. Since then I've started to look for them and I see that Natalia Osipova, among others, seems to wear them. They're the most obvious at her website on the very first photo in the "Giselle2" gallery, but they can also be seen here.
Personally, I think it's kind of sad that ballet now has such high standards of appearance that dancers wear these bulky pads. I can't imagine them being very comfortable, and I'm sure Osipova's feet would look fine without them. Are these becoming more and more common among professional dancers?

I don't know how common they are, but it seems silly to me. It is the flexibility and strength of the foot, and the line that can be created that matters, not the bump on top. I can't imagine that bulky pads would result in a dancer being cast in more ballets or being more loved by an audience. Perhaps it is a result of insecurity or misplaced priorities.

Good question, canbelto. It is kind of like stuffing Kleenex into your bra, isn't it? As long as they don't hurt the dancer or cause discomfort there's no harm in them, but I wouldn't like to see dancers taking any chances just to attain Banana Feet. As vipa notes, it's not the look that's most important. Not everyone can be Alessandra Ferri or Lynn Seymour, and would that even be desirable?

I, too, would be interested to know if this is a trend.

Given what toe shoes do to toes, it's hard for me, a civilian, to imagine how adding something padded would be more uncomfortable.

I think feet will be the Next New Thing. There are already articles about strength in pointe work appearing in the teaching literature (and, I believe, even in Pointe), and lots of different kinds of "enhancements."

I wish musicality would be the Next New Thing -- I guess I'm an old fogey.

I think that it just looks bulky, especially when the foot isn't pointed. Zenaida Yanowsky and these Bolshoi ballerinas also seem to be wearing them.

At SAB, some of the boys used to put cotton balls on top of our feet inside our tights or socks. The problem, of course, is that if you ever have to dance in a ballet without tights or barefoot, your feet will look rather different.

It would look very strange if the sole doesn't curve as much as the top. In the Agon photo, Yanowsky's standing foot doesn't look like it has anything, but the attitude foot looks like it might.

I've never noticed this, and I've been paying a bit of attention to ladies' feet these days, as so few point fully when in motion. We have an epidemic of lazy toes, and I don't know what kind of enhancer can help that.

I hope this is a trend that goes away quickly. It actually calls attention to the feet -- creating an illusion of bulkiness, the opposite of sleek. I love dirac's comparison to stuffing Kleenex into bras.

Actually this is in no way an "arch enhancer." It's a kind of camouflage -- a diversion. They are trying to downplay a problem by exaggerating something else. "Small breasts? Try an artificial hump on your back. Everyone will look at that!"

I'm with vipa:

Possibly this is less obtrusive when worn by dancers, like those in canbelto's photos, who usually perform in huge theaters with the the audience seated far away. From close up, they give the impression of bandaging.

Here is a video of Zenaida Yanowsky which has many many closeups of her arch-enhanced feet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytFdZYwAQVw

I agree with carbro that especially with those dancers without much of an arch in their soles, it just looks like a huge bunion or bandage in the middle of the foot. I just wonder if ballet companies are now encouraging dancers to wear them.

Her feet look all thick and swollen when they are flat on the floor in the Sylvia clip. It looks like there are some unattractive
side effects for the illusion of a greater degree of arch when her feet are pointed. I don't really like the effect.

I can't stand the idea of arch enhancement. I agree with you all!

Didn't Gelsey Kirkland had some sort of reconstructive surgery to enhance her arch...?

It occurred to me that a dancer like Virginia Johnson, whose feet were very asymmetrically arched, might use one to reduce the mismatch of appearance.

I thought I read that somewhere that there is a way to have some kind of silicone (like breast enhancements) implanted in her arches.
I think feet are the "thing" right now. I have seen beautiful dancers rejected by major programs and companies when they have everything else except huge arches. I dont think Osopova is wearing arch enhancers. I think she has elastic inserts in her shoes but I cannt see arch enhances. However onstage her feet are quite strange. I have heard that Zenada wears them. I wonder if it gives the dancer more confidence onstage.

If you look at Osipova's website you'll definitely see some pictures where the arch enhancer is obvious. I read an interview with Altynai Asylmuratova in which she said she wanted all the girls at the Vaganova School to have feet as pretty as the girls at the Paris Opera school. I would hate to think that schools such as the POB and Vaganova are rejecting girls simply because of a lack of banana arches, considering how many great dancers have had less than ideal feet.

Not every dancer at POB has a big arch. Rather, it's the way they use their feet that makes them so extraordinary.

I don't know why banana arches are considered that attractive. From the side, there was little line to McBride's feet, for example.

Probably a minority opinion, but the thing I like most about Suzanne Farrell physically -- apart from musicality and her energy and sense of risk -- was her feet, the only dancer who could make me unaware that she was wearing pointe shoes, and her feet couldn't have been more different than McBrides. I could watch her feet in Chaconne -- especially with the emphasis on walking in the role -- or Mozartiana all day long.

canbelto, for the record (supposing you are thinking of the Asylmuratova interview here), what Altynai Asylmuratova admires about the Paris Opera dancers is how they use their feet, their attention to the footwork - not that they all have allegedly ideal arches (which they don't). She's basically just comparing schools and their respective qualities/shortcomings.

To avoid further misunderstandings - AA: "Graduates from the Paris Opera Ballet School are perfect in this respect. Their feet are a true delight. Even though our School has always been famous for arms and upper body, I think it should be possible to enhance our feet. It's not even a question of changing the methods of teaching, we just need to switch the accents."

Marc, do you know what "switch the accents" means in this context? Is it something very technical? Or is she just saying, in effect, "spend more time working on"?

Bart, it means that they need to take better/more care of certain things than they used to.

It is very obvious when a dancer wears arch enhancers: first it deforms the foots natural curve. Where is the beauty in that? Many younger dancers use these enhancers, in class or auditions and are told very boldy to remove them. I know some professionals who use them, and again it takes away the natural beauty of the foot, it makes them look awkward and you begin to wonder what is wrong with that dancers feet, instead of the beauty of the movement.

Pacific Northwest Ballet is one of my favorite companies and I know for certain, under the direction of Francia Russell and Kent Stowell, that beautiful, extreme, high-arched feet were a requirement for any dancer to walk through the studio door.

I saw Whitney Jensen perform at YAGP and she was wearing them. It made her foot look strange because the underside of the foot did not correspond with the top of the foot.

Fashion decides what parts receive enhancement. For historical perspective, just look at the bustles of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And it wasn't just then, either. About a century earlier, "cork rumps" came into fashion. There was a cartoon of ladies floating about in the ocean on their backsides. This was at the same time that men were still wearing breeches, and for those poorly-endowed in the foreleg, they could buy "pithen calves" to bolster their appearance. Alexander Hamilton was exceedingly vain about his shapely pins and would wear red stockings in order to force people to look at them! As for arch enhancers, fine for stage, if they're properly fitted, but never for class!

Yes it looks very strange - as if there's some kind of a growth on the foot.

This is from the perspective of someone who has never been in a ballet class.
When I first started watching ballet, I remember my friends, who had a higher knowledge of the art, talking about and comparing dancers' empeines-(the Spanish word to denominate the arch/curve of the foot). I quite couldn't never understand this obsession and praising of those dancers-(females AND MALES)-who seemed to be boneless on their feet...At the end I noticed that it didn't really made certain steps more beautiful, easier or more secure to perform-(like those sautees on pointe from the Dulcinea/Kitri variation, or Giselle's solo, or the Cuban Black Swan coda). Hence, certain dancers with close to distortion arched feet were as good or bad as those with a regular arch.

After comparing some of the rehearsal photos of Natalia Osipova to the performance photos, I do agree that she is wearing enhancers in performance. Honestly, I find this shocking. The fact that a dancer as accomplished and respected as she is feels the need to wear enhancers is sad to me. I don't think this is Osipova's bad, I think it is just a sad reality of the pressures of dancing ballet.

When I was dancing in high school, a dance mom at my school was actually the person who developed the fancy feet arch enhancers that are now available in Discount Dance Supply. She tried the enhancers out on our feet to get what she felt was her best design. I remember being so excited that I could have a quick fix for my feet. I didn't have bad feet by any means, but having a 'great' arch was something I had always dreamed of. The enhancers really don't effect your dancing, except for the fact that sometimes they can be too tight and give you a cramp in your arch.

As much as I love ballet, this is one of the reasons that I eventually quit. It is the most beautiful art form I have ever seen and I have so much respect for everyone that does it. I just feel that the pressures it puts on its young students can be incredibly unfair (i.e. arch enhancement, the need to be thin).

Dancing is as much about emotion, musicality and beauty as it is about having an arched foot.

I'll have to look again, but for right now I'm not convinced that Osipova's feet are padded at all. In the second photo, she is sickling very badly the foot in retire, but the lumpiness of hte instep of hte standing foot looks real to me -- many dancers feet develop an almost arthritic bumpiness in the joints where the metatarsals meet the tarsals -- Patty McBride had a big bump there, that was not a pad. Kyra Nichols also. That's what Osipova's feet look like to me at least in these pictures.

A high instep makes for thrilling geometry, especially when the knee is bent, in coupes or passes. It's said that Gelsey kirland had silicone implants in her insteps, and indeed they WERE high insteps -- which DID fabulously sharpen the line of her lower leg in pas de chat. In a ballet like Theme and Variations, where there's a dazzling phrase that involves double pirouettes and pas de chats, moving very fast, those brilliantly pointed feet of hers made dazzlingly faceted traceries every time the knee bent and the foot came up....

Kirkland always had those feet, at least as far back as when she was eleven, which is when I met her. One of the things which distinguished her from other students with gorgeous feet was that in addition to being beautiful, they were also strong!

Thanks, Mel -- I never wanted to believe that....

About a decade ago, I took my then teenage daughter into NYC to see a doctor who worked exclusively with dancers. At some point in the conversation, he commented that daughter had nice arches and wouldn't need to ever use an arch enhancer. I remember being totally floored that dancers actually wore them! He said that I'd then be surprised at how many dancers at both NYCB and ABT used them. It makes me sad somehow.

Sigh... Vipa, I so heartily agree. That, and epaulement.

Just wanted to say that I found this picture of Osipova where the arch enhancers are VERY visible:
http://bolshoi.ru/common//img/uploaded/pla...a-jump-3-bg.jpg

When canbelto started this thread he asked two questions, “What do people think of arch enhancers?” and “Are these becoming more and more common among professional dancers?”
I first became aware of “arch enhancers” about 12 years ago when in a UPS shop in London where I was waiting to send a package, the person in front of me, a cash customer, was asked to open his package and lo and behold it contained “arch enhancers” and we got into a conversation and he explained he manufactured them and was sending them to a high profile dancer in Europe.
It is interesting that a high arched foot is not only aesthetically pleasing in a ballet dancer it is a requirement (in degrees) for the aesthetic an academic classical ballet dancer.
To a doctor looking at some dancer’s feet, he would possibly see it as a pathological condition or a deformity known Pes Cavus which literally translates as claw foot. If you read medical papers the condition is something to be treated even operated upon. However Orthopaedic practitioners who have some experience of dancer’s feet or knowledge of the aesthetic would not be do concerned.
When you have seen on stage the aesthetically exquisite movement and shapes created by the great dancer Alla Sizova’s feet, nothing less really counts. But lets takes us back to the real world, there is nothing wrong with a reasonably arched foot if everything else required to become an academic dancer is in place. Anna Pavlova had an incredibly high arch, Dame Margot Fonteyn did not, but it did not detract from her performances as the whole body moved with grace combined with a flowing, interpretative line.
The idea of arch enhancers goes beyond the reasonably blocked toe show for me and shows something incomplete in dancers that use them. I have go back to the exquisitely expressed statement of Paul Parish, "A high instep makes for thrilling geometry, especially when the knee is bent, in coupes or passes."

I read this thread and can't help but think not of enhancers of arches, but of the enhancers in the bodices of many of the Mariinsky's costumes. It looks so strange to see the women's arms move or back stretch, while their curves don't, as flesh would. I find it mildly distracting.

I don't understand the perceived need to make the dancers appear more womanly. In classical ballets (which is where they pad the costumes), the women are by definition the idealized feminine.

Yes! I've seen this same phenomenom with some actresses in their red carpet dresses, specially during certain poses while wearing some strappless numbers with stiff underwire mechanisms in the bodice. They kind of retrieve back the torso, with arms leaning on the hips and shoulders pointing forward. The result is that the upper part of the dress doesn't keep attached to the skin...weird, uh...?
The effect is something like this...
http://gracemagazine.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/carrie1.jpg

Rather than blame the dancers who use arch enhancers, blame the artistic directors who insist on the high instep and the audience members who discuss "feet." Everyone from Sarah Lamb to Irina Dvorovenko uses them, and it is not because they lack artistic ability or technique. And, yes, those two wonderful dancers definitely enhance their arches. For me, it is a shame that by today's "body" standards, it is possible that some of the great artistic dancers such as Plisetskaya or Fonteyn might not have had a chance to be hired into a major company unless they enhanced their arches. And it is hard to know who we are never going to see because of the new standards.

And while on the subject, what about this...?



“The Pro-Arch® is a device designed to increase the flexibility and strength of the ankle and toes, achieving the best possible arched foot”

http://www.kaboodle.com/hi/img/c/0/0/c/d/A...AAAAAAAzaog.jpg

It may be designed for that, but any dancer can do it as well and better using her/his own hands. Gadgetation, I calls it.

To be honest, from the following image, I like better the "before" than the 'after". But again, this is from the non-expert point of view.
http://edge.shop.com/ccimg.shop.com/220000...lt_16309838.jpg

Not that it matters, but I agree with Miami.

Me too.

That thing looks like some kind of medieval torture machine: "Tell us the enemy's plans, you dastardly villain, or we'll put you in the Pro-Arch® (now available at fine dance suppliers from Lotharingia to Wessex. Local Danegeld may apply.)!!!