ruining pointe shoes?

[Guest dance4life87]

Theres something I dont get... Im not on pointe shoes yet but I was watching center stage, and when I saw the part in the movie where the girls are all burning their shoes, pounding on them with hammers, bending them, putting water on them and then like scraping the leather on them too and why do ballet dancers do that in the first place? if it's for a better fit, well then wouldn't the ballet stores already have enough variety on tight shoe fitting for the feet?

[Mel Johnson]

They're actually "micro-adjusting" the shoes to fit their individual preferences. Some people like the shoes just as they come out of the box, others like to fiddle with them. For the greatest pointe shoe fiddler I can think of, there was Anna Pavlova, who would get her shoes 100 pair at a time from her shoemaker, a certain Sgr. Nicolini! She would storm around backstage, wailing that not ONE shoe was even usable. Then she'd calm down, and decide that well, maybe half of the shoes had some possibilities. She'd then set to work, ripping a shank out of a "hopeless" shoe and replacing it with another from a different pair, and stitching here and there, then beating the behoozis out of the boxes with a hammer, so they were nice and soft. Then she'd darn over the platforms of the shoes, to enhance traction, and provide a bit of external cushioning. By the time she was done, she had mixed and matched bits and pieces from the entire shipment, and had a few odds and ends left over, but she had 200 pointe shoes!