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I usually wore heels, so I'd carry two pair to every gig that I'd not done before. One pair would have leather soles, the other would be the same kind of shoe but with rubber on the soles and heels. I found I used the leather soles the most, because the majority of floors were either carpet or not terribly slick (and I always liked a little slickness for turns). BTW, Stiletto (sp) heels don't work well on deep or shag carpeting because they throw you off balance, but the wider character shoe type heel is usually okay. The rubber soled shoes were for super slick floors, particularly wooden ones that had been polished ... uuuggghhhh! If you wear ballroom shoes with the suede bottoms, they work well on slick floors too.
Uneven floors and outdoors are another problem, and I've been known to shed my shoes completely for a floor with throw rugs that I could trip over or big lumps and potholes that I would not be as aware of in shoes. Outdoors, I've worn both ballet slippers and character shoes, but they're usually ones that are a little older and I don't mind if they get a bit messy.
A lot of this depends on your dance style, too, and how much you move around the floor, but I discovered it's best to practice both with and without shoes so that you can dance either way, depending on the situation.
A good tip a teacher once told me is that if you find you're going to have to dance on a very slick floor and you don't have appropriate shoes with you, dowse the bottoms of your shoes with Coke right before you go on and enter with a series of spins or walks all around the floor. By the time you're done with that, you'll have a stickier floor to dance on.
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