For the Love of Our Character Shoes
Look down at what’s on your feet. Does it spark any memories? Do any stories come flooding to your mind?
Does it spark joy when you hold it in your hands? No? Well, Marie Kondo says to get rid of it.
You know what continually sparks joy for us, something that we’re not going to be getting rid of anytime soon? Our character shoes we bought in Ukraine.
Wearing a heeled shoe in Ukrainian dance has always sort of been a right of passage — it’s a step up from slippers in your younger years and the gateway to what comes next: the red boot. And for the guys, maybe you feel the same way about your transition from slippers to red boots — they might not have a heel but they have just as much street cred.
The character shoes we wore in Ukraine were also a gateway of sorts, introducing us to new steps, choreographers, friends, and, yes, lots of stories.
We bought our beloved character shoes from Postmark Ukraine.
Not sure about you, but we both (Hannah and Kaitlin) have a favourite pair of character shoes, no question about it. We got ours at the start of our year in Ukraine, in September 2017 in Kyiv. We bought them through Postmark Ukraine, run by former Virsky and Pavlechenko dancer Lana Niland. She runs the business in Kyiv, where she lives now.
Anyways, so these character shoes. When we — we being the two of us and a few others doing the Our Year in Ukraine program, offered by Cobblestone Freeway Tours — first picked them up from Lana, we thought they were the wrong size. All of us.
We could barely put a foot in them, never mind dance in them.
After double checking with Lana, she assured us they were the right size according to our measurements but said we could exchange them if necessary. We figured she knew best, so we stuck with them.
This was already a bit into our time, maybe a couple weeks, training with the Virsky Studio dancers in Kyiv. Not that we were ever totally comfortable dancing there, since we pushed ourselves to keep up with these dancers training at an incredibly high calibre since childhood, but by this point we at least weren’t terrified, which was the general feeling we had our first few days in the studio.
To start breaking the shoes in, all we could do was put them on and sit in them — standing up put too much pressure on our feet. So that’s what we did for the first few days after getting them. Then eventually we could walk around in them — in pain.
And then, after a few days of lightly breaking them in, it was finally time to debut our character shoes in the studio. We had a technique class that day — ballet we did every day, then after ballet we’d have a technique, character, or choreography class.
All of us dancers would go across in a diagonal, doing this spin and that, and then afterwards, the instructor would go down the line, one by one, offering corrections. That first day I (Kaitlin) debuted my shoes, I was a little — ok, a lot — more wobbly than usual, and the instructor noticed, asking me why I wasn’t spinning as well that day. “It’s my shoes,” I thought — the one time I had a somewhat valid reason for not keeping up with the others. I of course didn’t say this — because I couldn’t really say this in Ukrainian and because I knew better than to give an excuse.
During another class, this time a choreography class, one of the dancers was absent, and so the instructor called on us Canadians to fill in. But I (Hannah) could not — unless I took a good few minutes prying my feet out of those tight, tight shoes to change into slippers, which I wouldn’t dare to do. So I had to pass it up. “You should have just sucked it up!” you’re probably thinking. Oh, how I wish I could have. But that’s just how much pain I was in. And, thankfully, I had another chance to jump in during class, a bit later on when I — and my feet — felt more comfortable in the studio.
By the end of Kyiv, we started to get more comfortable wearing these brand new shoes. They meant a lot to us, since we bought them at the start of our journey in Ukraine, and, though we maybe didn’t think of this at the time, looking back, this probably helped our connection to them — they were one of the things that stayed constant during our year, as we moved from city to city, adjusting to each studio, learning new styles of dance, and meeting new friends.
And though we started to appreciate these shoes a bit more by the time we went to Lviv, they sure as heck still hurt our feet.
Lviv was kind of a city of tests — literally because we had a college dance exam at the end of December, but also figuratively because we were forced to push ourselves more, faced with tests from ourselves rather than ones given to us.
Here we trained with the Yunist ensemble. Unlike other ensembles we trained with, this was not a state ensemble, as in this wasn’t a job for the dancers and was more similar to some of the ensembles we see in Canada — a hobby rather than an occupation. The dancers put their heeled shoes on mainly for performances, instead of routinely putting them on after warm-up like we did in Kyiv.
We had come so far since we first met our character shoes, and we didn’t want our relationship to them — and our comfort in them — to stop growing. So we tried our best to put them on during the technique and choreography sections of class. But, admittedly, we didn’t wear them as much as we maybe should have.
The same goes for when we trained at the college. We studied Hutsul, Lemko, and Buko dances, quite intensely, and it wasn’t until the week before our big exam that our instructor told us we’d need to do the test in character shoes. Which makes sense but threw us off since we weren’t anticipating it — and it kind of threw our dancing off, too. I think this really showed us how different dancing in a heel is than dancing in slippers.
Back in Canada, our instructors — or us as instructors — would encourage dancers to put on a heel in rehearsal. But sometimes, for whatever reason, this didn’t happen, or happened for a few weeks then stopped for a few weeks. It’s not like we didn’t realize wearing a heel changes how you have to dance — but this experience at the college in Lviv really emphasized how important it is. We went from doing these difficult Hutsul character barre combinations confidently in slippers to being wobbly in heels.
But we learned our lesson. In heels we shall dance.
Our next city was Chernivtsi — and if we started to grow apart from our shoes in Lviv, then Chernivtsi was where we fell back in love. Here we had our first — and second! — performance with a state ensemble, getting to debut our beloved black character shoes on stage only a week after we starting training with the Bukovyna ensemble.
This is also where I (Hannah) started to appreciate the look of character shoes with costumes, even more so than I did before. In short, the ensembles we trained with in Ukraine wore character shoes for every dance, except for Hopak. Even in Buko, they didn’t wear what we’d call regular black dance boots — they’d wear character shoes or lace-up boots.
It was the same in Lutsk with the Volyn state ensemble — they’d mainly wear red character shoes. And I (still Hannah here) just love the look of being able to see an entire leg and how much an ankle and foot is pointing. Dancers can look so much more precise. I just feel like movements can get so lost when you wear a dance boot.
Hopak is one thing — I’m not saying we should never wear boots again — but maybe we should take more into consideration when choosing footwear. Instead of, “Oh growing up I wore black boots for Zakarpattia and Bukovyna dances, and so the dancers I teach must also wear black boots,” we need to take more into consideration. What are the movements and do they get lost in a boot, can dancers be precise wearing a boot, and so on. And this is aside from a whole other conversation about staying true to authentic costuming versus adapting to stage dance costuming.
Anyways, that’s my little boot versus character shoe tangent. But yes, Chernivsti, and then Lutsk, was where I started to really appreciate the look of a character shoe.
Lutsk is also where we started to better adapt to dancing in Ukraine, able to more quickly pick up the style of the ensemble. This is the city we could noticeabley see ourselves improve and evolve — and where our character shoes improved and evolved.
By this point, our shoes had become a part of us. We were dancing five days a week, and each day we were eager to put on our shoes after our ballet barre. Then one day, some of the dancers asked to see the bottom of our shoes. They looked like, well, regular bottoms of shoes. But this would just not do. At once, it was arranged for the costume lady to take our shoes.
The Volyn dancers all had this added layer to the bottom of their shoes, giving more texture for improved grip on the slippery studio floor. It was a little scary giving away our shoes for alterations, the pair we had been through so much with. But we figured we might as well, after all, the Volyn ensemble dancers were the ones who encouraged us to do so.
So a few days later we got our shoes back. And … they were tough to dance in. We couldn’t spin! We had too much grip! But in no time at all, we started to wear down at this new layer until it was just right — giving the perfect grip on any floor. Patience — this is something our shoes taught us over and over again.
Next stop was Poltava, where our shoes were so valued they even got their own changeroom. Well, we got the changeroom, and our shoes would stay there every night, like we were truly part of the ensemble, real professional dancers, who danced so often they kept belongings at the studio since it would be only a matter of hours until we returned.
This was our last city we trained in, and, like Lutsk, we again felt like we improved so much here. The ensemble had a pretty strict schedule: 45 minutes of ballet, 15-minute break, 45 minutes of technique, 15-minute break, 45 minutes of choreography, and, if needed, after another 15-minute break, some extra work on choreography.
Right after ballet we’d put on our character shoes for the rest of class. This was a task we were forced to do in our changeroom only, but if it were up to us, we’d cut down on our time out of the studio. Though our instructor could see we were eager to learn, that we were willing to take shorter breaks if it meant we could work on our skills in the studio, he also stressed the importance of giving ourselves a break.
He also stressed the importance of tea — we had our own kettle in our changeroom to make tea for our breaks.
You know how sometimes after dancing in your character shoes a lot, no matter how much you worked them in, your feet still hurt for days on end? Or maybe not even days on end, but even for the rest of the evening. Well, we didn’t feel that. Our shoes fit us perfectly, our feet had become so strong, and we were at the point where we craved to have those beautiful black shoes on our feet. Because if we were wearing them, it meant we were dancing.
Our character shoes kind of have a full-circle story. After buying them in Kyiv from a fellow Canadian, we had our official Our Year in Ukraine final performance in Poltava in front of a crowd with Canadians (and Americans), who were on a two-week dance workshop tour across Ukraine.
Our character shoes saw us grow, as we stumbled along the first time we put them on, mildly ignored them and put them to the side, re-appreciated them, altered them, and then when we proudly, and might we say confidently, performed one last time, alongside the rest of our character-shoe clad crew, smiling about the memories made in these shoes, and those that are yet to come.
Maybe that’s the hidden definition of “character shoes,” a definition known only by those who dare search for the true meaning. Yes, they are named for the style of dance — character dance — but could it be they are named because wearing them and falling in love with them will also lead to your evolved character? We’re going to go with yes.
If you’re not a dancer you probably don’t realize how much of a connection you have to a pair of shoes. Maybe it’s just something you put on your feet, or just something to get you around. But holy do these character shoes have stories to tell.
They have so many memories — and even feelings — attached to them. When I (Hannah) am not wearing them, I can see the indents made by my toes, and a little bump from the start of a bunion. You’re welcome for that imagery.
Looking at the bottom, I see a circle where I wore away the grip put on in Lutsk from all that spinning in Poltava. When I came back to Canada and opened up my suitcase with my character shoes, I took them out, and just seeing them had memories rushing back to me. I put them on and did a fashion show for my family, saying, “Look, this is what I lived my life in for an entire year.”
After dancing in Canada again, unfortunately the strap broke, which I have yet to fix. But a part of me is wanting to wait until I’m in Ukraine again. Those are my Ukraine character shoes. People in Canada just wouldn’t be able to fix them. They don’t speak the same language.
My (Kaitlin’s) character shoes are still going strong, which I’m thankful for. I’ve been pretty good at wearing them consistently each dance rehearsal since I’ve been back in Canada, not only because I know the importance of training with a heel on, but also because putting them on has become a bit of a ritual for me. I choose which leg warmers to wear, depending on my mood, depending on which Ukrainian city I want to connect with based on where the leg warmers are from or where I wore them the most. And when I finally choose the leg warmers and slide on those black character shoes, I feel like anything is possible. I know that anything is possible.
We didn’t expect to feel such a connection to a little pair of character shoes. But that’s how life goes — you never know what you’ll feel connected to, how something will shape your life, or how you’ll shape something or someone’s life.
And that’s why we’re starting this podcast and blog. From 2017 to 2018, we lived in Ukraine studying dance, language, and culture. And we like to joke that the year ruined us.
Well, maybe ruin isn’t the right word — it dramatically changed us, shaped us into who we are now and who we are becoming. We feel so passionate about sharing our experiences and learning more about other people’s experiences, too.
To listen to the podcast version of this post, click here.