How Royal Ballet dancers prepare their pointe shoes|The Royal Ballet

My name is Yasmin Nagdi. My name is Evie Turek. My name is Claire Calvert. Getting your first pair of pointe shoes is an exciting experience. I think my first pair of shoes were size two and a half. Each pair has a character. I call it character because it's very individual and how I make my pointe shoes for myself is my job. Everyone has their own routine to prepare their shoes. I have a layer of sort of felty fabric material in the shoe. I just pull that out. It creates a little bit of a lump in your foot which can be really uncomfortable so I just tear that out. Then I darn the ends of my pointe shoe because it helps not slip and I think it looks really beautiful. It kind of extends the line of the foot. I carry around a Stanley knife, scissors, general sewing stuff if a ribbon or elastic comes off. I personally like to know what I'm going to get when I step on stage so I would tend to wear the pair of shoes during a ballet class before so my foot has had a chance to feel what it is going to be like on stage. It's actually really interesting to look at the shoe that comes out of production that goes to the shoe room and is put in our pigeon hole and what they actually look like once we've hacked them to pieces and made them into the shoe that we want them to be. The shoe definitely goes through quite a big process. We have so many demands put on the dancers that if we didn't have the support of our shoes we couldn't deliver to the high standards that we do. This season I started to count how many pairs I wore already. It's about 22 pairs already. It's only been two months. It's very important to have a shoe that really fits you well and works for you. For us pointe shoes are one of the most important things because without pointe shoes ballet don't exist.