‘We risked our lives for $250’: how pole dancing exploded out of strip clubs and became serious art
If you tell someone in Edinburgh you’re going to see a pole dancing show, they might direct you towards the so-called Pubic Triangle, where the city’s strip clubs are. But there’s more to pole dance than that – and it’s popping up in theatre shows across the fringe this year. Not only do these acts show off amazing physical feats, they also tell stories that range from one woman’s HIV diagnosis, to the relationship between a neurodivergent mother and son.
Since the boom of the 1990s, when Zoe Ball famously had a pole in her living room, pole has been taught at dance studios, has become a competition sport – there’s a campaign to get it into the Olympics – and made its way from cabaret stages to theatres. It’s an impressive and fiendishly difficult art.
Gina Alm saw a video of a pole dancer on YouTube when she was 15 and immediately knew she wanted to do it. “I was very moved,” she says. “I asked my parents for a pole for my 16th birthday.” And she got it, a pink aluminium one. What was the appeal? “It’s a visually stunning thing,” she says, “but also, I’m a lifelong athlete and the exertion, the exhaustion and the physical quest of it, is really appealing. You can do things that appear to defy physics. It’s magnetic to watch and I saw a lot of potential in it, immediately, as an art form.”
Yvonne Smink came to pole dance having been a climber, and transferred her grip, strength and balance to this new discipline (she’s since won multiple Dutch championship titles). She says for her it’s a kind of movement therapy. “I can just shut off my thinking and move with the music. It’s like time stops.” Smink calls herself a dinosaur, having been in the industry a long time. “When I started, there were no theatre pieces using pole dance. That just didn’t exist. It came from the strip clubs. Now it’s like a whole revolution happening. It’s exciting for me to see.”
“I think pole really contains multitudes,” says Alm. “People can appreciate how sexy it is, how athletic it is. It can be an art piece or a piece of dance theatre.” In Edinburgh, Alm is performing Dusk/Night/Dawn alongside US national pole art champion Donna Carnow, whose background is in contemporary dance. The pair both work on the New York cabaret scene and their show is a dreamlike journey through the world they inhabit. “Travelling through the underbelly of night into the dawn,” says Carnow. It’s a show about the act of entertainment, and the grind of a dancer’s life: “Our lives and our labour.” The pair recall finding themselves on all sorts of stages, at all hours of the night. “Risking our lives for $250,” says Alm, “under the craziest circumstances.”
They perform on a hanging pole that swings 5m above the stage, although in other shows Carnow has performed 15m up. “It’s been such a joy,” she says, “but it’s a lot for your nervous system, ‘Wow, I’m literally hanging on by a couple of skin cells!’” Watching Carnow perform, she is superhero-strong – her abs even get a gasp when she first reveals them – but it’s her moves that are most impressive, spinning up the pole in a red sequinned bikini and killer heels, glittering as she turns. It’s mesmerising. She pretzels her limbs into knots around the pole, at speed, suspended seemingly by just the arch of a foot, a hip, an elbow.
As well as the hanging pole, there’s the static pole and the spinning pole. They’re made out of shiny, slippery chrome, and you need bare skin to get any traction (that’s why pole dancers are so scantily clad), but you can get poles coated in silicone, for more grip. Like a guitarist’s fingers on steel strings, your skin has to toughen up. “You have calluses in weird places, but it’s crazy what your body can get used to,” says Carnow. “The backs of my knees feel like a lizard,” says Alm, “but I need that to hang on there.”
Yvonne Smink, over video call, shows me her battle scars. “Can you see that discolouration?” she says pointing to her wrist. “And I have thicker skin on the inside of my right thigh, and also more hair.” The hair growth is apparently a response to the friction. “A lot of women have this. Some shave it off but I’m like, ‘It’s natural, it’s just how it is.’”
For Smink’s Edinburgh show, Poles, she has a specially created piece of apparatus, a frame made of multiple poles: vertical, horizontal and diagonal. “It’s like a spider,” she says. Poles was created with director Guilherme Miotto. “It blew my mind,” he says of her first performance. “Yvonne has such a deep commitment – it’s almost a spiritual experience.”
Poles is about Smink’s relationship with the pole, based on what Miotto calls “instinctive performance”, which makes room for improvisation and exploration within the framework of the show. “I’ve done pole dance for 15 years now,” says Smink. “I show up every day to the pole dance studio and the pole is always the same. But every time I do it, something new happens. The performance is about instinctive discoveries. It is somehow really magical.”
Sadiq Ali describes himself as a “pole-trained circus go-go boy and dancer”. The Scot started out in circus and trained on Chinese pole, a traditional circus apparatus coated in rubber – you can scamper up it like climbing a tree. For that one, you need to be fully clothed or we’re talking serious friction burns. He thrusts his arm at me and displays a blurry red mark. “I caught this on the rubber and blew out my bicep.”
Ali forged a busy career in cabaret and also dances in clubs – he did a season in Ibiza last year. But he wanted to move towards something deeper and more narrative. His first theatre piece, The Chosen Haram, about a queer Muslim couple, got glowing reviews. His latest piece, Tell Me, is about a woman’s response to being diagnosed with HIV.
“Why is pole a good way of telling any story?” Ali muses. “It doesn’t seem a natural fit to storytelling,” he admits. “But there’s something about the physicality of the body overriding the need for intellectual narrative.” In other words, the audience get a visceral experience of the story. In Tell Me, pole work exists inside the world of the show, not as a separate trick. “Drops and descents, things like that, are exciting when they’re used sparingly, and can enhance story without spectacle. If people stop and clap mid-show,” he adds, “I’ve done it wrong.”
As a choreographer, the pole literally adds another dimension. “It’s a continuation of the stage in a different direction,” says Ali, something Tamsin Shasha also brings up when we discuss her fringe show, Forgive Me; she talks about swimming up the pole to a world that’s beyond the ceiling, or the pole representing a place of imagination separate to the stage.
Shasha has a background in restaging ancient Greek dramas and in circus, while her last show was about the Japanese art of bondage, shibari. “I’m interested in using my body, and in unconventional ways of telling stories,” she says. “I want to tell a story that’s really compelling. Last year I got a diagnosis of ADHD and the possibility of spinning on the pole and telling that story really appealed to me.” Shasha’s son had had an autism diagnosis a few years before, and Forgive Me examines their sometimes discordant relationship.
Shasha’s pole is visible behind her in her Brighton living room. She turns 60 this year and loves being “on the air” as she puts it. “I love the grace of it. And I love that it’s a workout for your whole body.” She also loves her pole community in Brighton and doesn’t shy away from pole’s roots in the sex industry: “It’s an opportunity to get on these big heels,” she laughs, pulling out a pair of giant platforms with what must be 8in heels.
She still gets a few comments and raised eyebrows. “People have very strong opinions about pole,” she says. “When you say you do pole there’s still that, ‘Oh! You do that?’” Ali gets a different kind of comment when people see the level of strength it takes to suspend his bodyweight in the air. “Men see my show and say, ‘Oh, you do callisthenics, bruh!’ And I’m like, ‘It’s pole dance, guys.’”