POINTE COUNTERPOINTE.(ballet slippers)

Onstage, the ballerina is an ethereal creature, balancing on the inch-wide platform of her pointe shoe. Backstage, she's a stock clerk, seamstress, blacksmith, and wrecking crew. Maintaining the central illusion of ballet--that women don't walk, they waft--takes a lot of work and a lot of shoes. The average, traditional pointe shoe, a Capezio or a Freed of London, is mostly handmade, still created in the painstaking way it was in Anna Pavlova's day: out of satin, cotton, flour, water, and not much else. One pair of toe shoes costs sixty dollars and lasts about an hour. New York City Ballet spends half a million dollars a year on them.

The shoes are not just ...