The Red Shoes: Beyond the Mirror
An exhibition in London celebrates the 75th anniversary of Powell and Pressburger’s ballet film and visual masterpiece, The Red Shoes (1948)
“The ballet of ‘The Red Shoes’ is from a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen,” explains Boris Lermontov, the fictional impresario and ballet company director played by Anton Walbrook in the film of the same name. “It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance […]. At the end of the evening, she is tired and wants to go home. But the red shoes are not tired. In fact, the red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by – but the red shoes go on.”
This is the premise of the 16-minute ballet sequence at the heart of The Red Shoes danced by prima ballerina Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, who becomes the star of the Lermontov Company and also of the Powell and Pressburger film.
Image: Exhibition view from The Red Shoes, Beyond The Mirror. Photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
The script is displayed in the BFI exhibition The Red Shoes: Beyond The Mirror in London, which examines the film’s germination, realisation and legacy, including costumes from Matthew Bourne’s 2016 full-scale dance production, and publicity shoot for a video to accompany Kate Bush’s 1993 album The Red Shoes.
Akin to the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939) the red pointe satin ballet shoes are a powerful visual motif of attraction and flight in the film, a seesaw motion between love and art, career and coupledom, which stand in opposition to each other; Victoria Page cannot have both. Two pairs of the original ballet shoes feature here and they are distinct in character: one pair is pristine with red ribbons and belonged to Noreen Ackland, the continuity supervisor, and the other, ribbonless and worn, belonged to Tom Smith, a make-up artist. This pair is of particular significance as they are signed by Shearer and her two dance co-stars, Robert Helpmann (her suitor in the ballet and known for his later performance as the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and Léonide Massine (who dances the role of shoemaker). They are on loan from their current owner, director Martin Scorsese, himself a great admirer of Powell and Pressburger.
Image: Exhibition view from The Red Shoes, Beyond The Mirror. Photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
The visitor’s journey to meet these red shoes is itself one of sharp contrast between the cool-grey exterior of the 1950s concrete architecture of London’s South Bank Centre to the interior walkway of teal curtains strung with brightly coloured lights framing peacock blue walls. “Colour is used to wipe you away from the normal world and bring you into the world of the film,” says designer Simon Costin.
Image: Moira Shearer's red shoes lent by The Film and TV Charity photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
The first pair of shoes are shown as a projection in front of excerpts of Victoria Page dancing the ballet. “I wanted to use theatrical effects in the exhibition,” explains Costin, “So we have a Pepper’s Ghost.” This magical illusion, which borrows from the history of early cinema using projector and mirror, repeats a similar moment at the beginning of the ballet, where Page sees herself in the shoemaker’s window with the red shoes laced to her feet. “We’ve got that interplay between object and moving image, the tangible and the intangible,” adds the exhibition’s co-curator, Claire Smith.
Just as intriguing are the Scorsese dance shoes in the adjoining room. Shorn of their ribbons, they look forlorn, and stained and dirtied they remind us of the film’s ending when, unable to choose between dance and love, the ballerina hurls herself onto a railway track and is hit by an oncoming train. “Julian, take off the red shoes,” she whispers to her lover and he removes them, kissing her white stockinged bloodied feet, an echo of the final rites in the ballet.
Image: The Red Shoes poster (©) Park Circus, ITV Source, BFI National Archive.
All 53 dancers of the corps de ballet, as well as the leads, had their pointe shoes supplied in a variety of hues by Freed dance shoes on St Martin’s Lane. Established in 1929 by cobbler Frederick Freed and his wife Dora, a milliner, the shop still stands today. It is where some of the world’s greatest ballerinas have bought their shoes, from Margot Fonteyn in the 1930s to contemporary principal dancers Sylvie Guillem, Tamara Rojo and Leanne Benjamin. Freed of London crafts about 700 pairs a day in its factory in Hackney, using materials that are biodegradable and natural. “When the dancer heats up and sweats, the shoe does too, and that makes it mobile and also silent,” says a spokesperson for the company. A pair of adult pointe red shoes will retail at about £60 and they are sold without ribbons, which are purchased separately and usually sewn on by the dancer.
In the ballet of The Red Shoes, Léonide Massine’s devilish shoemaker is as sharp and quick as the knife he uses to file his nails; in his hands, the ballet shoes are already dancing, manipulated and dangled by their ribbons like a puppet. One has the feeling that it is he who is behind their power, controlling the action, just as the shadowy presence of Lermontov strives to control his young star.
Image: Moira Shearer's Red Shoes lent by the collection of Martin Scorsese photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
Few props survive, but one that is recreated is a full-length newspaper figure. In a surreal scene, Victoria Page duets with a dancer made of newspaper, a dream sequence that references an earlier moment when she learns she has secured the lead role from a discarded windblown newspaper. Her tulle dress suddenly acquires the splash of printed headlines. “The sense of art and artifice is so important in Powell and Pressburger cinema that we really wanted a little bit of the magic of the built set,” explains co-curator, Claire Smith. “A lot of the collection we’re working with is of paper, so to have paper animated and brought to life is something we wanted.”
The curators were unable to track down the costumes. “We’re working on the basis that this is still in that post-war period of heavy rationing. Textiles are still in high demand and short supply and they would have gone back to be re-used, re-cut, recycled…” says Claire Smith.
About two hundred garments appear in the ballet alone. At Pinewood Studios, two wardrobe women, Dorothy Edwards and Elsie Withers, rose to the challenge. “Give us some girls and machines and we will make the dresses ourselves,” they said. In an article in The Irish Times (1947) journalist Douglas Liversidge gives a marvellously evocative description of their industry in rather cramped conditions:
“Hot flat-irons hiss and spit little clouds of steam. Nimble fingers pass colourful robes through sewing machines that hum merrily to radio music. The rooms are ablaze with many colours…”
Image: Costume for Ashley Shaw in The Red Shoes (Matthew Bourne 2016) lent by New Adventures photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
Hein Heckroth, assisted by Ivor Beddoes, designed both costumes and sets. Heckroth made over 350 basic drawings, and the visitor can admire the liveliness and quicksilver imagination poured out in rapid impressionist colour sketches. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were not interested in the modest realism of British cinema in the mid-20th century, and the team they gathered around them reflected a fusion of British and continental sensibilities, visible in the settings in France and the smatterings of spoken French, the figure of Lermontov, lightly modelled on Diaghilev and the surreal elements of the ballet – the Daliesque landscape and Magritte-inspired cut-out silhouettes.
The Red Shoes also brings into collaboration couturiers who dressed Shearer and Ludmilla Tchérina, a fellow dancer in the film who chooses love. Their everyday wear was designed by Jacques Fath and Mattli of London for Shearer, and Carven of Paris for Tchérina. Jacques Fath was then considered one of the three dominant influences on post-war haute couture (the two others were Dior and Balmain). Colour and costume were built around Shearer’s shape, skin tone and red hair and the evening gown she wears in the south of France complements both her looks and the coastal location: a pleated cloak of billowing dreamy sea-green with princess crown, a nod perhaps to Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête that came out two years earlier.
One item that was tracked down is Shearer’s black velvet Digby and Mortimer dress worn on a publicity tour. “There’s something magical about the physique it suggests,” says the curator, “but also that partnership between couture and the film industry.”
Image: Kate Bush album cover The Red Shoes. Photo by Deborah Nash.
It took a year to persuade Shearer to accept her role and the process of making the film was not always a happy one, with tension implicit in moving from the continuous live performance of the stage to the stop-start repetition under hot lights on concrete floors, with filming and technology taking precedence.
In the legacy section of the exhibition are three costumes from Matthew Bourne’s production designed by Lez Brotherston. Striking are the two ballet dresses worn by Ashley Shaw as Victoria Page. Comprising a bright red velvet bodice with gold embroidery over a white skirt, they are reminiscent of the film’s fringed stage curtain, and while one is neat and clean, the other is tattered and torn, reflecting the physical demands on the dancer’s body.
Through the many delights in this bijou exhibition, we get to experience the enchantment of the film. The Red Shoes really do keep dancing.
Text by Deborah Nash
The Red Shoes: Beyond the Mirror is on at South Bank London until 7 January 2024.
Find and more and your book free tickets:
southbank.london/whats-on/the-red-shoes-beyond-the-mirror
“The ballet of ‘The Red Shoes’ is from a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen,” explains Boris Lermontov, the fictional impresario and ballet company director played by Anton Walbrook in the film of the same name. “It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance […]. At the end of the evening, she is tired and wants to go home. But the red shoes are not tired. In fact, the red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by – but the red shoes go on.”
This is the premise of the 16-minute ballet sequence at the heart of The Red Shoes danced by prima ballerina Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, who becomes the star of the Lermontov Company and also of the Powell and Pressburger film.
Image: Exhibition view from The Red Shoes, Beyond The Mirror. Photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
The script is displayed in the BFI exhibition The Red Shoes: Beyond The Mirror in London, which examines the film’s germination, realisation and legacy, including costumes from Matthew Bourne’s 2016 full-scale dance production, and publicity shoot for a video to accompany Kate Bush’s 1993 album The Red Shoes.
Akin to the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939) the red pointe satin ballet shoes are a powerful visual motif of attraction and flight in the film, a seesaw motion between love and art, career and coupledom, which stand in opposition to each other; Victoria Page cannot have both. Two pairs of the original ballet shoes feature here and they are distinct in character: one pair is pristine with red ribbons and belonged to Noreen Ackland, the continuity supervisor, and the other, ribbonless and worn, belonged to Tom Smith, a make-up artist. This pair is of particular significance as they are signed by Shearer and her two dance co-stars, Robert Helpmann (her suitor in the ballet and known for his later performance as the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and Léonide Massine (who dances the role of shoemaker). They are on loan from their current owner, director Martin Scorsese, himself a great admirer of Powell and Pressburger.
Image: Exhibition view from The Red Shoes, Beyond The Mirror. Photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
The visitor’s journey to meet these red shoes is itself one of sharp contrast between the cool-grey exterior of the 1950s concrete architecture of London’s South Bank Centre to the interior walkway of teal curtains strung with brightly coloured lights framing peacock blue walls. “Colour is used to wipe you away from the normal world and bring you into the world of the film,” says designer Simon Costin.
Image: Moira Shearer's red shoes lent by The Film and TV Charity photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
The first pair of shoes are shown as a projection in front of excerpts of Victoria Page dancing the ballet. “I wanted to use theatrical effects in the exhibition,” explains Costin, “So we have a Pepper’s Ghost.” This magical illusion, which borrows from the history of early cinema using projector and mirror, repeats a similar moment at the beginning of the ballet, where Page sees herself in the shoemaker’s window with the red shoes laced to her feet. “We’ve got that interplay between object and moving image, the tangible and the intangible,” adds the exhibition’s co-curator, Claire Smith.
Just as intriguing are the Scorsese dance shoes in the adjoining room. Shorn of their ribbons, they look forlorn, and stained and dirtied they remind us of the film’s ending when, unable to choose between dance and love, the ballerina hurls herself onto a railway track and is hit by an oncoming train. “Julian, take off the red shoes,” she whispers to her lover and he removes them, kissing her white stockinged bloodied feet, an echo of the final rites in the ballet.
Image: The Red Shoes poster (©) Park Circus, ITV Source, BFI National Archive.
All 53 dancers of the corps de ballet, as well as the leads, had their pointe shoes supplied in a variety of hues by Freed dance shoes on St Martin’s Lane. Established in 1929 by cobbler Frederick Freed and his wife Dora, a milliner, the shop still stands today. It is where some of the world’s greatest ballerinas have bought their shoes, from Margot Fonteyn in the 1930s to contemporary principal dancers Sylvie Guillem, Tamara Rojo and Leanne Benjamin. Freed of London crafts about 700 pairs a day in its factory in Hackney, using materials that are biodegradable and natural. “When the dancer heats up and sweats, the shoe does too, and that makes it mobile and also silent,” says a spokesperson for the company. A pair of adult pointe red shoes will retail at about £60 and they are sold without ribbons, which are purchased separately and usually sewn on by the dancer.
In the ballet of The Red Shoes, Léonide Massine’s devilish shoemaker is as sharp and quick as the knife he uses to file his nails; in his hands, the ballet shoes are already dancing, manipulated and dangled by their ribbons like a puppet. One has the feeling that it is he who is behind their power, controlling the action, just as the shadowy presence of Lermontov strives to control his young star.
Image: Moira Shearer's Red Shoes lent by the collection of Martin Scorsese photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
Few props survive, but one that is recreated is a full-length newspaper figure. In a surreal scene, Victoria Page duets with a dancer made of newspaper, a dream sequence that references an earlier moment when she learns she has secured the lead role from a discarded windblown newspaper. Her tulle dress suddenly acquires the splash of printed headlines. “The sense of art and artifice is so important in Powell and Pressburger cinema that we really wanted a little bit of the magic of the built set,” explains co-curator, Claire Smith. “A lot of the collection we’re working with is of paper, so to have paper animated and brought to life is something we wanted.”
The curators were unable to track down the costumes. “We’re working on the basis that this is still in that post-war period of heavy rationing. Textiles are still in high demand and short supply and they would have gone back to be re-used, re-cut, recycled…” says Claire Smith.
About two hundred garments appear in the ballet alone. At Pinewood Studios, two wardrobe women, Dorothy Edwards and Elsie Withers, rose to the challenge. “Give us some girls and machines and we will make the dresses ourselves,” they said. In an article in The Irish Times (1947) journalist Douglas Liversidge gives a marvellously evocative description of their industry in rather cramped conditions:
“Hot flat-irons hiss and spit little clouds of steam. Nimble fingers pass colourful robes through sewing machines that hum merrily to radio music. The rooms are ablaze with many colours…”
Image: Costume for Ashley Shaw in The Red Shoes (Matthew Bourne 2016) lent by New Adventures photo by Sarah J Duncan, BFI.
Hein Heckroth, assisted by Ivor Beddoes, designed both costumes and sets. Heckroth made over 350 basic drawings, and the visitor can admire the liveliness and quicksilver imagination poured out in rapid impressionist colour sketches. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were not interested in the modest realism of British cinema in the mid-20th century, and the team they gathered around them reflected a fusion of British and continental sensibilities, visible in the settings in France and the smatterings of spoken French, the figure of Lermontov, lightly modelled on Diaghilev and the surreal elements of the ballet – the Daliesque landscape and Magritte-inspired cut-out silhouettes.
The Red Shoes also brings into collaboration couturiers who dressed Shearer and Ludmilla Tchérina, a fellow dancer in the film who chooses love. Their everyday wear was designed by Jacques Fath and Mattli of London for Shearer, and Carven of Paris for Tchérina. Jacques Fath was then considered one of the three dominant influences on post-war haute couture (the two others were Dior and Balmain). Colour and costume were built around Shearer’s shape, skin tone and red hair and the evening gown she wears in the south of France complements both her looks and the coastal location: a pleated cloak of billowing dreamy sea-green with princess crown, a nod perhaps to Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête that came out two years earlier.
One item that was tracked down is Shearer’s black velvet Digby and Mortimer dress worn on a publicity tour. “There’s something magical about the physique it suggests,” says the curator, “but also that partnership between couture and the film industry.”
Image: Kate Bush album cover The Red Shoes. Photo by Deborah Nash.
It took a year to persuade Shearer to accept her role and the process of making the film was not always a happy one, with tension implicit in moving from the continuous live performance of the stage to the stop-start repetition under hot lights on concrete floors, with filming and technology taking precedence.
In the legacy section of the exhibition are three costumes from Matthew Bourne’s production designed by Lez Brotherston. Striking are the two ballet dresses worn by Ashley Shaw as Victoria Page. Comprising a bright red velvet bodice with gold embroidery over a white skirt, they are reminiscent of the film’s fringed stage curtain, and while one is neat and clean, the other is tattered and torn, reflecting the physical demands on the dancer’s body.
Through the many delights in this bijou exhibition, we get to experience the enchantment of the film. The Red Shoes really do keep dancing.
Text by Deborah Nash
The Red Shoes: Beyond the Mirror is on at South Bank London until 7 January 2024.
Find and more and your book free tickets:
southbank.london/whats-on/the-red-shoes-beyond-the-mirror
1 comment
I wish I didn’t live half a world away and not moneyed enough to pop over for a weekend to see this exhibition. I just watched the film again for the second time….the last time was a few decades ago…such a sad story but a beautiful film…so cleverly made for its time. We also watched Martin Scorsese’s explanation of the restoration.