The most common question I’m asked is “why can’t I go on pointe?”.
If you’re under 11, the answer is, “you’re too young”. Sorry! You will see 9 and 10 year olds on pointe, but it can be very dangerous unless they’ve been examined and approved for pointwork by a specialist doctor. Go on pointe too young, and you could damage or deform your feet and ruin your career!
Some girls are ready for pointe early, but it’s impossible for even the most experienced ballet teacher to judge. Only a qualified specialist can do that. That’s why most teachers play it safe and insist their students don’t start pointe until they are 11 or 12.
But what if you’re almost that age, and your teacher says you’re not going to be ready for another year or so? How can you convince her you will be ready by your 11th or 12th birthday?
The answer is – improve! Your teacher must see some weaknesses in your technique – so if you fix them, she’ll change her mind. If she’ll tell you where your problems are, all the better – but if she won’t, you should work on everything.
Your teacher is basing her judgment on how long it takes a typical student in her classes to develop the skills for pointe. So you’re not going to progress fast enough if you just do your normal classwork, even if you do extra.
I don’t recommend doing your regular ballet exercises at home, anyway – alignment and accuracy are very important in all ballet steps, and it’s just too easy for you to allow tiny bad habits to creep in when you’re practicing without a teacher to correct you.
Luckily, there are plenty of prepointe exercises which you can do unsupervised – and because they’re very targetted at preparing for pointe, you can make progress much faster.
I recommend The Perfect Pointe Book as a great source of exercises which target all the important areas for pointe work. It’s not a book, really, it’s 4 whole DVD’s which will help you with everything from getting more arch in your foot, to holding your turnout en pointe. What’s more, you can get help and advice from the author, Lisa Howells, who’s a qualified physiotherapist. So if you want to get on pointe fast, it’s an indispensable buy!