Danse la Ballerina

Next to my house there is an old timey movie theatre, heroically resisting these times of crisis, where I go often to get lost in the darkness. What makes this theatre very special is that it still shows art movies, original language films, and documentaries on such artists as Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic, to name two. I recently saw a film called “Danse la Danse” a farewell to the 20-year director of the Spanish National Ballet Company, Nacho Duato.

For many years he was critized for breaking with traditional classical ballet, coreographing daring contemporary performances and turning the Spanish company into a melting pot of dancers from different nationalities.  I truly believe he has been one of the best talents that Spain managed to retrieve after his formative years abroad…at least while he was at it!

All this made me think of the shoes we call "bailarinas", so prevalent in the female wardrobe in Spain since I was a child. Little girls, their mothers and their grandmothers wear them all the time. They are flat, comfortable, cute, and very feminine.

But you know who made them so cool and internationally known nowadays? The British partner of a Spanish shoe-maker, thats who. David Bell met Ursula Mascaró, from the Mascaró family in Menorca, specialty ballerina dancing shoe makers (est 1918) who eventually branched out into daily-wear "bailarinas" production as well as other shoes.  One day David suggested to his girl, why don’t we sell bailarinas exclusively, on-line? We could name each pair after a celebrity and give them some sort of personality (a bit similar to what Camper had done for their shoes, but anyway…). So, dicho y hecho, “Pretty Ballerinas” was born as its own branch in February 2005. Its success was so overwhelming that they opened their first store in London in 2007. The rest is history. A very good example of foreign marketing applied to a Spanish product. The fact that the “Pretty Ballerinas” cost double the normal ballerinas seems a minor detail…

The original ballerinas from my childhood resemble the real ballerina dancing shoe with its little twisted lace on the front. They come in tons of colors and when they have a bow, they are called “manoletinas” (again the reference to Manolo, or better said Manolete, the famous Spanish bullfighter because they looked like the ones used by the toreros).  In leather, patent, suede, with sequins, faux fur, transparent, folding, the variety is endless. As far as I am concerned, every little girl, woman and  señora must have a pair. The Spanish Style dixit.