Dance Shoes

En Pointe

Chloe Woggon

The title of this exhibition piece is En Pointe. It represents a pair of pointe shoes that were worn for the IUSB Dance Company’s presentation of Swan Lake, performed July 12, 2013 at the Lerner Theater. The shoes are a part of this exhibit documenting the history of IUSB campus because they are artifacts from the dance program, a program that has only recently grown in its development at IUSB. Dance is offered as a minor, requiring 18 credit hours, and just this past year expanded to offer a concentration in dance under theater studies. It is hoped that sometime in the future the university will offer a major in dance studies as well.

IUSB Dance Company first performed Swan Lake to live music by the IUSB orchestra in the Raclin School of the Arts Auditorium in November of 2012. Each summer the theater and dance department takes shows to the Lerner Theater of Elkhart, and so Swan Lake was performed a second time, this time to a soundtrack. This is the pair of pointe shoes I wore for the second performance, and they were purchased two weeks before the show. This is a relatively short amount of time to break in new shoes before a performance, but the pointes on my previous shoes were too soft. The shoes were last worn at our summer performance at the Lerner this past summer, August 7, 2014, and are now too exhausted for further dancing.

I chose these shoes because not only have I completed a dance minor here at IUSB, but dance is the reason I originally enrolled at the university. As a transfer student who had taken some time off from studies, I missed dancing—an activity I grew up doing but had not done for five years. I was also very interested in choreography and decided to become a part time student to take some dance courses. After one semester I became a full time student again, resuming my major studies in anthropology. Dance has been a big part of my life while at the university, and I have been a company member since my enrollment, rehearsing two to four days a week for a few hours. The program has also helped me realize a personal passion, and pushed me to express myself in a new way. I am now even inspired to incorporate dance into my anthropological studies and work in the future.

The title En Pointe is the French expression for dancing “on pointe”. I decided to use this expression because I am also a French major, thus encapsulating two of my interests: dance and French. In addition to this, however, ballet was originally codified internationally in France during the reign of King Louis XIV, and thus the vocabulary used in ballet studies across the globe is French.