Kirk McKoy, Los Angeles Times
HEY, IT'S ART: Pole dancer Laura Martin performs for the crowd at Club Good Hurt.
The pole vaults into a new role
Pole dancing, long associated with strip clubs, is sliding into the mainstream as an art and a (clothed) competition sport.
By Susan Josephs
May 24, 2009
Wearing a gauzy blue two-piece costume that resembles a circus
acrobat's uniform, Laura Martin climbs up an 11-foot steel pole in a
move popularly called the "Caterpillar Crawl."
Aggressive and athletic yet fluid and hyper-flexible, she proceeds
to blaze through a pole-dancing routine of inverted suspensions, spins
and slides.
Hoots and whistles from the female-dominated crowd compete with
the live music provided by the rock band Avowed. One woman screams to a
friend, "It's just like trapeze!"
Martin, a former exotic dancer, appreciates the comparison of what she does to something other than adult entertainment.
"I want to see pole dancing get away from the stripper connotation,"
says the 30-year-old San Diego-based performer and personal fitness
instructor. "I want people to see it's like any other dance form."
The weekly showcase at Club Good Hurt in West Los Angeles
represents the latest evolution in pole dancing's migration from the
strip club to the fitness class to the mainstream performance venue. It
features Southern California pole dancers performing to live rock music
in a setting where, according to show producer Emilee Wilson, there's
"no tipping and no stripping."
While pole dancing has been gaining acceptance in recent years as a
form of physical fitness -- classes are offered in gyms and dance
studios across the country -- there have been few performance
opportunities outside of exotic dance clubs for dancers who spend years
perfecting their skills and seek professional, artistic recognition.
Though the fact that the dance poles are easily portable and
installable on a variety of surfaces point to a range of performance
possibilities, Wilson and others say the opposite is true.
"There's just not a lot out there right now so that people can see pole
dancing as a serious dance form," says Leigh Acosta, a 30-year-old pole
dance instructor, aerial artist and recent performer at the showcase.
"I think a lot of people still see it as something scandalous, the way
people thought burlesque was scandalous, or belly dancing."
That may change, however, considering that Cirque du Soleil hired a
champion pole dancer in January to perform in its Las Vegas-based
"Zumanity," and pole-dance competitions judged by dancers and
choreographers have sprung up all over the world.
The year-old New York City-based US Pole Dance Federation, for example,
plans to sponsor annual competitions and pledges on its website to
promote pole dancing as a "sensual and athletic art form."
Locally, there's Wilson's effort to produce an "acrobatic pole show for women who want to perform but not in a strip club.
"What I'm doing is offering women a safe space where they get respect,"
says Wilson, a 27-year-old actress and pole dancer who used to perform
at Jumbo's Clown Room, a Hollywood bikini bar. "Most of the women I met
at Jumbo's were really artistic, and none of them had implants. They
were there because they really wanted to perform, and performers need
an audience."
About 100 people -- with a roughly 3-2 female-male ratio -- packed the
red-paneled bar and checkered dance floor area on a recent Monday to
watch a lineup of performers that included Acosta, Nicole Williams, a
popular local pole-dance instructor, and Mina Mortezaie, whose forte
seems to be perfectly executed vertical and inverted split maneuvers.
Mortezaie, 26, trained in gymnastics, modern dance, jazz, ballet and
hip-hop before discovering pole dance. "I got addicted to it
immediately because it combines everything I've been obsessed with:
strength, flexibility, grace."
Though she considered working at strip clubs, Mortezaie has created her
own performance opportunities, which have included staging "pole
nights" at the Culver City restaurant and bar Rush Street and forming
her own burlesque dance troupe that incorporates the pole in its
repertoire.
"I didn't want to dance for men in clubs," she says. "I wanted to dance for myself."
For her performance, Mortezaie wore a tiny pink-and-black bikini and
sported thigh-high shiny black boots. All of the performers wore
bathing-suit-type costumes, a necessity, they say, since bare skin
allows them to perform moves that require gripping with various parts
of the body. As for their high heels, "every dance has its shoe,"
observes Anna Grundstrom, the co-founder of the US Pole Dance
Federation. "In high heels, you can grip higher on the pole."
As a dancer, Mortezaie seemed to accentuate the sexy elements of her
movements. She considers this "empowering," while other dancers, like
Martin, favor a less overtly sexual approach.
"I actually try to numb that part down," says Martin, a self-taught
pole dancer who cross-trains in martial arts, yoga, boxing and running.
"You can't take a woman's natural seductiveness away from her, but I
tend to stay away from the shake-your-ass maneuvers."
Acosta, who demonstrates a languid, graceful performance quality in her
routines, feels she's "not a very sexy performer" but defends the
dancers who are.
"I think it would be wrong to take out the sexual appeal of it,
otherwise pole dancing would be nothing more than just stunts and
gymnastics," she says. "So much of dance is sexy. I've seen modern
dance performances where it looks like the dancers are having sex."
Judith Lynne Hanna, a dance scholar at the University of Maryland,
points out that many dance forms contain sensual or sexual elements and
were stigmatized at various points in their histories.
Hanna, who has served as an expert witness on more than 100 court cases
related to exotic dance regulation, also mentioned examples of highly
regarded choreographers such as modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who
received a warrant for her arrest in 1967 when she presented a dance
involving female nudity in New York.
"And then you have belly dancing, which contended with stigmas similar to pole dancing," Hanna says.
Though some people attempt to trace contemporary pole dancing to the
traditional Indian sport of Mallakhamb, or pole gymnastics, Hanna says
the form really got its start in the 1980s, when strip clubs "became
more upscale and elegant. I'm not sure when it became so gymnastic, but
at some point, pole dancers became very skilled," she says. "After all,
if everyone's doing the same thing but you do something different, you
could attract more tips."
Outside the strip clubs, pole dancing continues to evolve, with new
tricks and terms being invented and dancers exchanging information by
posting performance and instructional videos on YouTube.
"What I call an outside leg hook might be called 'the firefly' in one
studio and 'the fireman' in another," says Grundstrom, who mentions
efforts to "put a Web page together with names of moves we all agree
on."
Grundstrom feels that pole dancing is "in the middle" of significant
evolution. "Some people have kept the flowing, circling movements,
others are more athletic," she says, noting the recent petition to get
pole dancing included as an event in the 2012 Olympics.
"The athletes will see it more as a sport and the dancers as more
of an art," she said. "Our goal at the Federation is to make pole
dancing credible . . . the more you put pole dancing in other places,
the more you change people's minds."
The Minxx are back with their amazing burlesque revue at the end of this month.
My friend and teacher Jenyne Butterfly returns to Heart & Pole Dance Studio to teach three workshops on March 29.
