They have ballet shoes, white kid slippers, and tap and character shoes in patent leather with ankle straps.
What we actually saw on the stage was an opium dream of the heartbroken Solor, visiting his love in the Great Beyond, the so-called Kingdom of the Shades, inhabited by a ghostly all-female corps de ballet in white.
The first is about a romance between a ballet-loving white girl and a hip-hop-loving black boy in Chicago; the second is a French film set in New York, where a mute dancer tries to make it on Broadway.
Marie became one of the world's greatest ballerinas, and Filippo created his famous La Sylphide for her in 1832, the first of the "ballets blancs," or Romantic "white ballets".
His version of the ballet's original White Act is peopled by androgynous ghosts who rise through trapdoors in clouds of white dust and advance on their male prey with a blind, bestial vengefulness that is skin-crawlingly creepy to watch.
Today, Act 2 is a ballet blanc a "white" ballet in which all the ballerinas and the corps de ballet are dressed in full, white, bell-shaped skirts and the dances have a geometric design.
SHIRLEY -- "Snow White," Ballet Long Island; 2 p.m.; library, Floyd Parkway.
"Most of the time ballet dancers are white," he says.
Gwen-Mary Wells, the ballet teacher, was white.
ISLIP -- "Snow White," Ballet Long Island"; 3 30 p.m.; also 1 p.m., Dec. 21; Town Hall West, Main Street.
Not all ballet dancers are white, not all are rich, not all skinny ballerinas are anorexic, not all boy ballet dancers are gay.
