The Turning: Room of Mirrors · iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch

S2 Ep Bonus - Behind the Scenes

May 9, 2023·43 min·3 clips

Why are ballet pointe shoes still made of fabric, glue, and paper while sports equipment has evolved for safety?

1. This bonus episode of The Turning: Room of Mirrors features the show's production team — Erika Lantz, Aylin Lance-Lesser, James Trout (JT), and Emily Foreman — sharing research tangents that didn't fit the main series. 2. Erika Lantz is the host and producer; Aylin Lance-Lesser is her sister and co-writer/reporter; JT did sound design; Emily Foreman is the editor. 3. The episode's framing question is: what fascinating details did the team encounter in researching the series that never made it to air? 4. Aylin opens by discussing pointe shoes, which have been made of the same materials — fabric, glue, and paper — since their development in the 1830s, when choreographers wanted dancers to appear to float. 5. Modern pointe shoes concentrate a dancer's full body weight on the big toe joint, compared to the 30% loading during normal walking, causing stress fractures, ankle injuries, and severe blisters and bunions. 6. The company Gaynor Minden developed a plastic pointe shoe in the 1990s that is more durable, safer, and described by its founder as 'the first and only pointe shoe designed with dancers' health and safety in mind' — but most ballet schools ban it for students. 7. One celebrity ballet teacher justified the ban by saying 'ballet isn't about health, it's an art form' — a quote the team compares to hockey players who refused to wear helmets after the rule change. 8. The contrast with other sports is stark: soccer shin guards and cleats, and American football helmets, are lab-tested and iteratively improved, while ballet equipment has barely changed in over 150 years. 9. JT describes going down a rabbit hole researching the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, which Balanchine choreographed in 1960 — and which originated from a section of Swan Lake that had been lost since the 1870s. 10. Swan Lake's premiere in the 1870s was a disaster: prima ballerina Anna Sobyshevskaya was publicly dropped by a Russian oligarch just before opening night, choreographer Julius Reisinger cut approximately a third of Tchaikovsky's score, and reviews called the production 'crap.' 11. Tchaikovsky later rewrote a section of Act 3 for a subsequent run, but Swan Lake was eventually shelved by the Bolshoi, then remounted after Tchaikovsky's death with his brother revising the story and restoring Act 1 music — creating the version now considered classic. 12. The section Tchaikovsky had rewritten for Act 3 remained undiscovered in Bolshoi archives until 1953, when an archivist found the pages; Balanchine heard the music and premiered his Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux in 1960. 13. JT notes that the story of Swan Lake's chaotic premiere — described as 'crap' at the time — is ironic context for a podcast series about how resistant the ballet world is to change. 14. Emily describes her investigation into Holly Howard, one of Balanchine's first American muses, who participated in the 1934 premiere of Serenade and reportedly had four abortions attributed to Balanchine. 15. Emily found no obituary for Holly Howard, enlisted a private investigator friend who directed her to Ancestry.com, and tracked down Holly's niece — one of six she contacted — who confirmed Holly died of cancer at around age 50. 16. Holly's mother Lois threatened to have Balanchine deported after the relationship ended; an immigration agent did question Balanchine, but nothing came of it. 17. A footnote from a former Balanchine dancer contained a damaging rumor about Holly that Emily declines to assess; the team reflects that Holly's story in the historical record ends with the abortion comment and a framing of shame and erasure. 18. The team discusses their inability to know whether Holly's story involved agency they can't see, and whether the absence of documentation reflects deliberate erasure or privacy protected by Holly's family. 19. Erika closes by describing the wave of listener mail in response to episode six, where she discussed her own relationship with ballet; the most common response was from people who had pursued an art form intensely before leaving it and felt their experience had been invalidated. 20. Erika reads one listener letter from a musician who burned out at 16 after 14 years and a custom hand-built instrument, and who quotes Erika's question — 'so what is me because I'm me, and what is me because of ballet?' — as articulating exactly how she still feels about music three years after last touching her instrument.

As heard by us

A bonus detour that turns Swan Lake history into a story about revision, pressure, and stubborn beauty.

This bonus chapter gathers the stories the team did not have room for and lands on the most durable one: how Swan Lake kept changing over time. It works best when it treats ballet history as revision rather than monument, with bad reviews, Anna S.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A backstage detour that turns Swan Lake's revisions and revivals into the main event.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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