Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Vincent Tullo for the New York Times.
Tim Foster is a shoe colorist for New York City Ballet. “It’s a responsibility I take very seriously,” he says.

Someone I worked wth at the Fed had a daughter who took a lot of ballet. He was a good sport with her Nutcracker events, assuming the part of Mother Ginger, the character with the huge skirt that children run out of.

You ask what little ballerinas grow up to be if they don’t become big ballerinas? That little one became a ballet writer, reporting here for one of the big guys.

Margaret Fuhrer writes at the New York Times, “If you take the elevator at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center as high as it will go, then climb another flight of stairs and walk down a cinder-block hallway, you will reach a small space that looks like a cross between an artist’s studio and a chemistry lab. This is where Tim Foster paints ballet shoes.

“To be a shoe colorist for New York City Ballet, as Foster has been for 15 years, is to occupy a small yet important niche. Most pointe shoes and ballet slippers are manufactured in a pale pink. But the company’s repertoire requires a rainbow of hues, like canary yellow for the ensemble of Marzipan Shepherdesses in The Nutcracker, or powdery blue for the Butterfly soloist in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“In his tiny aerie, Foster — the company’s first full-time shoe colorist — sprays and daubs hundreds of shoes each season. It is a delicate art. He must match costume colors exactly, so that the footwear doesn’t break the continuous line of the leg. And paint must be applied sparingly, painstakingly, so as not to change the feel of the shoe on the foot.

“As a former professional dancer, Foster, 73, understands the stakes. ‘When they give you their pointe shoes to mist or to dye, that is a responsibility I take very seriously,’ he said in a video interview. ‘It has to be right, because it’s their sacred tool. It’s their violin. It’s their oboe.’

“For years, almost nobody outside City Ballet knew that Foster or his job existed. Then the documentary filmmaker Joshua Charow, who often profiles unsung heroes, stumbled across a City Ballet blog post that mentioned Foster’s work. ‘Right away, I was fascinated,’ Charow said in a video interview. ‘But I couldn’t find any other information about him.’

“Earlier this year, Charow connected with Foster and filmed him discussing his past as a dancer and his work with City Ballet. Charow was delighted to discover that Foster had also quietly been making visual artwork. His shoe-painting station is lined with white paper that becomes spattered with different colors over time. He uses pieces of that paper to create fanciful, Chagall-esque scenes, incorporating the residual splotches of shoe paint.

“ ‘I just start sketching over the top of the paper that kept all the splatters and marks,’ Foster says in Charow’s documentary, Shoes for Tim, which came out in July. ‘I lose myself in it.’

“Foster’s job has become busier recently. Pink shoes, meant to approximate skin color, used to be a ballet costume default. But a few years ago, City Ballet became one of several ballet troupes to rethink ‘ballet pink,‘ adopting truly flesh-toned footwear instead. Today, each company member has a shoe shade custom-matched to their skin. That requires a lot of painting.

“Naomi Corti, a City Ballet soloist, said in a video interview that she now visits Foster before nearly every show — to get her shoes touched up, yes, but also just to talk. Gentle and thoughtful, Foster has a knack for soothing preperformance jitters.

“ ‘He always knows what to say because he’s one of us, a dancer,’ she said. ‘It’s this very calming presence. He’s like the heartbeat of the theater.’ ”

Lots more detail at the Times, here.