Notes on pole dancing vermin 🦗
Plus: Trans Comedy Gala & free pole dancing classes! 🏳️⚧️
I’ve just wrapped the group work section of my QUEER NATURES artist residency, and I’m collecting my thoughts about it. The aim was to run a workshop and performance for artists to explore “desirability” versus “ugliness” in a pole dance performance, with the added dimension of BUGS – because bugs are gross, but also fun.
“Desirability” comes with the territory of pole dancing because of pole’s origins in strip clubs and sex work, where creating desirability is the labour and a worker’s desirability is their currency. Every artist involved in the workshop also already has a relationship with “desirability” through their involvement with burlesque, cabaret, stripping, kink and/or just existing in the world where you are shovelled facefulls of information about what is sexy or unsexy all the time.
I modelled my workshop very much on the ideas of Callum Stevens who specifically works on “ugly pole” (listen to the podcast we recorded about it here!), and then we brought everyone’s material together into a work-in-progress, experimental performance at Venus Pole London. I felt flattered and validated that this show specifically drew in people who would come to see art dressed as a pink sparkly worm.
This project was an invitation was to try something deliberately ugly, that doesn’t have to “work”, and actively pushes back against what’s usually praised in the pole world in terms of movement and performance. I was very lucky with the level of pole artists we were able to reach and commission for this project that nobody has anything to prove as a performer. It was interesting to notice resistance to this, in my own body first, and then through conversations with different acts. As pole artists and performers elsewhere, moving and teaching in a style that looks conventionally sexy, technically proficient and “clean” rather than “ugly” is generally what pays the rent and keeps the lights on.
It’s a hard habit to break, and one that I was careful to try and meet with curiosity, because that’s all part of the process of identifying what “ugly” reveals about what we consider beautiful and, by extension, valuable. I tried to make it clear as a facilitator that no reactions from the artist to this process were right or wrong - everyone’s response was a welcome part of the big ugly-sexy experimental soup, and the emotional experience ranging from confident enthusiasm to tentativeness about showing something deliberately ugly, weird, playful, experimental and unfinished are all part of what we were exploring together.
Tonnes of things came up in the workshop that each performer then went off to develop in a mix of cool and interesting ways, and for me one comment really stood out. When we were workshopping, we started to log ideas and details things we noticed in pole movement into two columns – one marked “ugly” and the other one marked “sexy”, and see which of the categories different shapes, intentions and vibes would fall under. I was struck by how many people commented that in movement we talk about as “sexy”, there’s clear markers of success or failure - whereas with “ugly”, it feels impossible to fail. The galaxy brain interpretation is that then “ugly” can bring you back right round to “sexy” as it comes with freedom, and a release of rigid expectations about what and how to perform. Which I then added a layer of complication to by asking everyone to put that in front of an audience, with a bug costume.
I’m still digesting all the different directions this took and cool stuff that came up from it, and also my own learning process about how to MC this kind of event - specifically within a pole space. Audiences in a pole dancing studio have a very distinct (and gorgeous) vibe, because many of them are pole dancers themselves, and understand how hard pole dancing is – so the support and enthusiasm you’ll get while somebody is performing a pole piece is generally pretty nuclear. For this project where the invitation was an enthusiastic response to have things fail, I basically transferred all my hosting from Alternative Comedy Memorial Society, a gig I used to co-host with Thom Tuck where we actively asked comics to bring material that WOULD NOT WORK in a normal comedy club.
It’s not hard to get a pole dancing audience to be vocally supportive – so for me, a moment when things got really interesting was where the audience were intensely focussed and quiet. One of the performers did a jerky, weird sequence that ended with her crumpled under a spider web, and the audience stayed completely still with her and kept the tension in the room until she smiled to release it.
It's been very lovely – especially while my group chats that watch UK news and beyond are popping off with anxiety around “god the fascism is really honking, huh” to slink around in a pole studio making art, and exploring all around the corners of what we box off as desirable, valuable and respectable about bodies and sexuality. The day before running this workshop I was at a pole competition where my friend Yarra won in her category with a pole performance about having to have an emergency C-section during the difficult birth of her son (literally six months before the competition, because pole dancers are metal 🤘🏻) – so, far from a medium that’s in any way restrictive about performing sexuality and gender, I feel very buzzed at the moment about what pole can do and all the “ugly” places it can reach.
Performers:
🪰 hosted by Flyza Minnelli aka meee 💋
All photos by Jennifer Forward-Hayter, Insta @jenny_graphic
In other news:
🏳️⚧️GO TO THE SUGAR: THE TRANS COMEDY GALA🏳️⚧️
Sweet Sam Nicoresti has organised a quite sickeningly delicious show at the Pleasance with a whopper lineup including Jordan Gray, Stewart Lee, Kemah Bob, one of my absolute favourite comics working at the moment Jen Ives and other funny hotties fundraising for Trans Legal Clinic. June 5th at The Pleasance, London, you should absolutely go.
FREE POLE DANCING CLASSES FOR TRANS & NON-BINARY FOLKS AT VENUS POLE STUDIO, LONDON
In solidarity with our trans and non-binary siblings after the UK’s horrible Supreme Court ruling on definitions of woman and latest toilets bullshit, friends of Venus Pole Studio generously donated so we could offer free pole dancing classes to trans and non-binary folks - there’s still 8 free spaces left!
All the info is on Instagram here , you can book onto classes with 💛ME💛 in Pole for Confidence on Wednesdays or either of the LGBTQIA pole classes for free using the code FTHESC.