Red Shoes

‘Red Shoes’, developed for opening performance for the ‘Elevation’ exhibition during the Fetishism in Fashion at MoBA 2013, curated by Lidewij Edelkoort

The Red Shoes deliberately exaggerate the language of desire. Their glossy red surface recalls the fairytale of the cursed shoes and the long history of red heels as symbols of sex, sexuality and seduction in both men’s and women’s footwear. In this project I deconstruct that symbolism by altering the very anatomy of the high heel: the stiletto is removed from its usual place and grafted onto the toe, changing both its meaning and its function. The shoe becomes a hybrid, its extended toe a phallic protrusion that echoes medieval poulaines, whose exaggerated points were once condemned by the Pope for their sexual connotations. The object hovers uneasily between the codes of the feminine and the masculine, attraction and threat.

In performance, the shoes become instruments of an endless “becoming” that never quite settles into grace. I imagine a newborn foal—beautiful, trembling, repeatedly trying to stand and collapsing again. The performer, like a fragile ballerina, is simultaneously empowered and disabled by the shoes. They allow her to rise into a momentary image of poise and elegance, only to tip her back onto her ankles, which suddenly seem broken. The action loops: standing, faltering, crumbling, rising again—an ongoing play of beauty and cruelty, aspiration and failure.

The environment is an active partner in this drama. On these altered pointe shoes the performer cannot stand independently; she must cling to a wall, railing or architectural structure. The staircase becomes a kind of stage set; a monumental, rigid plane against which the vulnerability of the body is framed. The contrast between the fragile dancer and the harsh geometry of the built environment heightens the sense of risk, exposing the tension between our constructed ideals of beauty and the physical limits of the body that strives to inhabit them.