In the 1948 film classic The Red Shoes, which sets the Hans Christian Andersen story inside a ballet company, there’s a scene in which 12 pairs of pointe shoes are laid out for inspection, each a different shade of red. Which one is the right shade? The apple red of seduction? The blood red of passion? The color symbolizes the story. Pointe shoes are generally pale pink, but there are many ballets in which the costuming requires a colored shoe—and that’s where Tim Foster comes in. He works for the New York City Ballet, where for the last 15 years he’s been in charge of coloring the women’s pointe shoes and the men’s canvas slippers. Formerly a dancer in musicals, Foster understands the importance of this work and has figured out the best ways to get deep color without stiffening the shoe, or to get more transparent color that pops. “There was no guidebook,” he explains. For instance, Serenade blue, the moonlit blue of George Balanchine’s first masterpiece made in America, actually has a lot of red in it. A labor of love, the work is solitary until it comes alive onstage. With the leftover dyes and pigments, Foster likes to make impromptu paintings, fanciful images that have the sweep of Chagall, the tremble of Marcel Vertès. Thanks to the documentary filmmaker Joshua Charow, Foster is now in the spotlight. In 17 minutes Charow tells the tale of a dancer’s discipline as it channelled from onstage performance to solo work in a backroom filled with shoes. “I love costumes,” Foster says, “so it was a perfect fit. I worked with the opera first, and then started dressing the children in Nutcracker. . . . They asked me, Could you paint shoes? And I thought, well, I painted my own at one time. I said yes.” —Laura Jacobs