Ballet Shoes and Ballerinas as Technology

In considering culture we need to contemplate the dynamic interrelationship between material things, human apprehension and ideas. It's with that in mind that this article looks really interesting:

Ballet Shoes and Ballerinas as Technology: A History En Pointe - Suzanne Fischer - Technology - The Atlantic:

Here's how it plays out with ballet dancing:

The bodies of dancers reshaped by pointe shoes are also technological. 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

The point here is the reflexivity of the technology/artefact produced for the art which in turn reshapes the aesthetic possibilities and further developments (including the flat-footedness of dancers consequent on the reshaping of their bone-structure).