After 60-plus years, Robin Williams, a ballet dancer, recently experienced a first: performing in pointe shoes that actually matched her brown skin tone.
Williams, herself in her 60s, purchased brown pointe shoes and tights for her Nutcracker performance this past December. Her shoes came with dyed ribbons and elastics to match her complexion perfectly, CNN reported. The store was not named, but her purchase marked a milestone, as today’s Black dancers are now able to buy shoes that match their hue.
Williams reflected that
early in her career in the 1960s, as the lone black ballerina in her company, brown pointe shoes weren’t an option. Her teacher emphasized that the pink tights were supposed to match the dancers’ skin. “I thought about it when she said that because I was like, ‘Well our skin isn’t pink.’ And I never forgot that,” Williams recalled, according to the outlet.The traditional pink shoes and tights break the visual line of the body on Black dancers, disrupting the intended graceful effect.
Some directors still make dancers of color wear pink for the sake of “uniformity.” While more shades have become available since 2020, “pancaking,” or slathering pointe shoes in makeup or foundation to modify the color, remains a common practice.World-renowned ballerina Misty Copeland shared a video of her painstaking pointe shoe makeup routine, saying the lack of options always made her feel excluded. Last September, Copeland started a petition for more diverse shades for Apple’s ballet shoe emoji.
For Cortney Taylor Key, who teaches
dance at the Misty Copeland Foundation, watching Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem performing in tights that matched their skin tones was groundbreaking. “There’s no amount of money that would make me disrespect Arthur Mitchell by wearing pink tights,” she said, according to CNN. She called traditional European pink “a tradition, and it can change.”While grateful for the progress, Taylor Key still modifies her own shoes to match her tone. The pancaking process is tedious, frustrating and costly, she said, and it wears shoes down faster. She hopes Copeland’s petition accelerates change
for the better.Meanwhile, for Williams, finally being able to perform in shoes her own shade was a breakthrough moment and a sign of hope for a more inclusive future of ballet.
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