Ballerina Performs Startling Pointe Number With Knives Attached To Her Shoes [Video]

A ballerina performed a somewhat horrifying yet hypnotic pointe routine with large kitchen knives strapped to the bottom of her shoes. The ballerina somehow was able to balance on the frightening shoes while dancing on top of a piano. The piece was performed as part of a video art installation by artist Javier Pérez. The ballerina, Amélie Ségarra, was the ballerina charged with pulling off the incredible feat.

The gravity defying performance by Amélie Ségarra was captured in an intense video that shows the ballerina pulling herself up onto the custom knife pointe shoes. Ségarra can be seen physically struggling to stay on the thin knife edges as she tiptoes across the top of a grand piano. Some of the more intense moments include the ballerina shouting out in frustration as she barely maintains her balance while edging as close to the piano’s edge as possible. She purposefully slashes and slices the piano top as she dances across the top of the piano leaving behind deep cuts and marks.

The piece is startling and meant to create strange feelings in the viewer. The ballerina is dressed in the typical, elegant dance attire in the form of a nude leotard. However, instead of the ballerina gracefully gliding across the top of the piano, we see her struggling to maintain her composure and at times, screaming out in pain.

Though it takes great strength and balance to pull of the feat of balancing on the edge of kitchen knives, Pérez wanted to showcase that out minds are at odds with what we are seeing. We see a graceful ballerina so somehow expect her to just accomplish the feat without an outburst of the emotions we see in the video.The artist wanted the viewers to feel empathetic towards the ballerina as she attempted to maintain her pose during the incredibly difficult challenge. However, he also wanted to show the moments that the ballerina felt defeated and broken from the challenge at hand.

“[Pérez] reveals the weaknesses that become the boundaries between seemingly irreconcilable concepts such as: beauty and cruelty, fragility and violence, culture and nature or life and death.”

As the artist expected, at least some commenting on the performance made his concept even more clear as they had hoped to see the ballerina perform the feat with full grace despite the difficulty at hand.

“Well that had a lot of potential to be awesome and she clearly has the skill and talent to have done something really beautiful but they made the consious [sic] choice to make it look awkward and stressful… I would have loved to see her dance gracefully to clasic [sic] music. The contrast of the knives would have been really neat.”

It seems that as Pérez expected, some viewers had a hard time contrasting the perceived grace of the ballerina with her shouts of pain and strained expressions. The woman was performing a feat that would be impossible to most, yet some viewers wanted her to be more “graceful.” Other viewers pointed out the irony in the statements as it perfectly summarized the feelings that the artist intended for the piece.

“Seriously, the mere fact that this woman is struggling so much in their final cut proves this. I can not imagine the torture that she endured and this guy wants her to do it ‘gracefully’. The fact it was able to be done at all is mindblowing. Expecting grace in such a situation is ungrateful and delusional.”

What do you think about this talented ballerina’s ability to balance on these customized knife pointe shoes?

[Image via Vimeo]