![]() ![]() ![]() Initially putting Hansel in a cage to fatten him up first, and forcing a chained up Gretel to help her cook and clean, the Witch's poor eyesight leads her to using a string to measure how fat Hansel's finger has gotten in the days or weeks that pass. The Witch lies in wait for the children in a house made of hard cake and candies, with window panes of clear sugar, to lure the brother and sister within with the intention of fattening them up, cooking and eating them. Most fairy tales depict witches using witchcraft for evil reasons such as creating treats such as gingerbread houses and poisoned apples to trap their victims as well concoct poisoned objects to murder their victims.Īrguably the most famous fairy tale to feature a witch as the main antagonist, Hansel & Gretel follows the adventures of the two titular siblings after they are abandoned in an enchanted forest by their parents. ![]() Witches possess the ability to practice witchcraft and may use magic for good, evil, or neutral reasons. For her contribution, she was honored with the Robinson Prize, awarded to the best first-time presenter.Witches in fairy tales are often depicted as old women with long hair, pointed noses, warts, claws, and hunched backs. That's why Laemmli's paper is important, paying attention not just to how dancers used their tools, but also how their tools changed them. The history of technology doesn't talk much about art. In fact, in 1980 dancers threatened to strike - not over hours or pay, but for better pointe shoes, and better management of them. For one, stars became a less central feature of dance companies as dancers became more interchangeable, and second, dancers came to spend hours working on their shoes - altering, gluing, and caring for them. ![]() And as their bodies were remade, dancers became "like IBM machines," modern and indistinguishable. Balanchine also encouraged dancers to let the shoes remake their bodies, including developing bunions that gave the foot just the right line. Dancers on this pointe regimen developed characteristically long, lean leg muscles. Laemmli argues that the new shoes forced dancers' bodies to move in new ways. He required all dancers (not just the principals) to go on pointe - and not for a few short moments, but for hours at a time. He worked with Salvatore Capezio to develop and patent pointe shoes to produced the exact lines of the foot and leg he thought beautiful, and to be quieter and less clunky than earlier pointe shoes. George Balanchine, the charismatic director who ran the New York City Ballet and its School of American Ballet, rethought pointe shoes. A pair of her shoes sold for 200 rubles and was cooked and eaten by her admirers.īut pointe shoes became rationalized in the 20th century, made by specialized cobblers to be stiffer and heavier. In the 1840s, when Marie Taglioni went on pointe for a few seconds in La Sylphide, her momentary weightlessness became an icon of the transcendent power of ballet. Laemmli opens with an anecdote from the romantic heyday of ballet. Laemmli's paper, "A Case in Pointe: Making Streamlined Bodies and Interchangeable Ballerinas at the New York City Ballet," looks at the way George Balanchine used pointe shoes to remake the bodies of his dancers into interchangeable machines. But, as Whitney Laemmli of the University of Pennsylvania argued at the Society for the History of Technology conference in Cleveland over the weekend, ballet's technology doesn't end there: The bodies of dancers reshaped by pointe shoes are also technological. Ballet pointe shoes are not typically thought of as technological artifacts, but they certainly are. ![]()
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