Wands, Pointe shoes and Fate?

The wand chooses the wizard but do the pointe shoes choose the dancer? Yes, in a sort of strange way I believe they do...

Yesterday I took two of my students to get their very first pair of pointe shoes. This was a special milestone for me as it is the first time I have put any of my students on pointe. I should have been helping some students to get on pointe a little earlier however the pandemic caused a delay in training which in turns means a delay in pointe!

With the help of the brilliant team at Roynon dance centre both students came away very happy with their new shoes. It truly was a magical experience and I don’t use the term magical loosely here because there were some strange things that happened that sort of seemed like things were meant to be…

The first strange occurrence, that some might describe as fate, is that both girls I took to the fitting had the same names as me and my best dancing friend who also went to get our first pointe shoes together. This wasn't deliberate at all, as I had invited 5 students to the group fitting but only two could make it!

The second funny thing about the pointe shoe fitting is that one girls shoes took 20 minutes to fit whilst the other took an hour. This was slightly strange as the same thing had happened almost 14 years ago, in that very shop, with me and my friend! It's important to realise that the timing of a fitting isn't a reflection of the dancer and sometimes things take naturally longer to ensure that the shoes truly are the perfect match.

The final thing that happened that made this fitting seem pretty coincidental was that both of my dancers ended up with the same shoes as each other...same size, same brand, same style! Magic eh?