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Arch in a dancer's foot
A high arch is valued in many styles of dance because of the extra flexibility it can bring to the bottom surface of the foot and thus its potential to enhance the degree of bend one can get when pointing the foot. However, as many who have been born with high arches can attest, they come with a price: supporting the weight of a body on an infinitely less hardy structure than a medium arch. My husband, not a dancer, has impossibly high arches that a ballet professional would kill for -- but is forced to shop very carefully for shoes lest he injure his feet simply by walking and working on them daily. What determines the shape of the foot is generally more structural (having to do with the formation of your bones) than muscular, so I suppose the bad news is that there is only a degree to which you can change what you are born with. (Or: as a professional dancer I can work at it all I like, but I will never equal the high beautiful arches of my husband the cameraman!) The good news is that, although you cannot change the bony structure of your foot, you can change both its strength and its flexibility by working on the muscles -- and to my knowledge the most effective way to do so is, you guessed it, dance itself. That's because every times you are pressing up into a releve or pointing your foot in to a passe you are working through the musculature of the foot (particularly the "plantar fascia," the muscular webbing that sheathes the bottom of the foot) sequentially, and every time you return to flat or flexed feet you are, hopefully, working that sequence in reverse. That action, which you will hear your teachers call "rolling through the foot," is one which effectively increases both the strength and the flexibility of your arch. Multiply that by the hundreds of times daily that a dancer executes such an action, and you will find that as you continue taking class, your feet will change in both strength and flexibility. (They also will become increasingly gnarled, callused and torn up in the process, so hopefully you are not planning on "foot model" as your second career!) This has definitely been noticeably true for myself: before I started to dance, my arches were so low and weak that they appeared almost flat and would ache every day after walking home from school. Since I began dancing, the pain disappeared without my even noticing it, and the appearance of my arches looks pretty much normal despite the fact that structurally, they are still relatively low. No one has ever come up to me after a performance and said, "I really enjoyed your dancing, but your low arches were really distracting." Which brings me to my next point (see variations on this in my answers to questions on flexibility elsewhere in this column). It's true that a higher arch makes for a lovely pointed foot, that super-curved shape we all desire (particularly if ballet is your chosen specialty). However, the brute truth of the matter is, once you are on stage, very few people are going to notice that Dancer A has more of an arch than Dancer B. The audience WILL notice if you are not really pointing your foot, or if you are off time, or if your dancing looks like it's 'by rote' rather than infused with all the passion you have for what you're doing. While important to a degree, an arch is a very small part of what will set you apart as a dancer in the long run. So: pay special attention to really rolling sequentially through your foot each time you point or flex in class. But at the same time, make sure you don't lose perspective by focusing too closely on something that is neither particularly mutable nor particularly essential to your career as a dancer. For good information on the feet, foot injuries and dance, I found: www.foot.com www.podiatrychannel.com Good luck dancing -- and have fun! Nicole
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