I went to the Fringe this year with one question: what feels fun?
When things you love doing get mixed with financial stress and career pressure, it’s easy for that to sink to the bottom of the priority list. I needed to reconnect with just the fun part. And it worked! I had a great time and remembered why people making their bonkers art in cramped, dimly-lit rooms is both frivolous and important.
I’m feeding this intention into the beginner pole class I’m teaching at Venus Pole London, and it’s been so fun to relearn how I originally got obsessed with hanging off a stick. When I was stripping I had 3 pole moves that lasted me 3 years. You don’t need a huge range of tricks to move with confidence and do interesting things. It’s really exciting to design lessons to help people find what feels good for their body and move more like themselves.
The hippie woo woo part of me has also noticed a recurring pattern with pole dancing: pole often finds people after a big change, and helps pull them back towards themselves. This is true for me and my own pole history: the pole found me in strip clubs when career stuff was going nowhere and helped me make money; it stopped me going mad when I ended up in my parents basement during the pandemic; when my friend died and my mental health fell apart like old wet Chinese newspapers, pole dancing calmed down my shattered nervous system and slowly helped piece things back together.
Maybe it’s the legacy of strip clubs that means pole dancing channels the ingenuity, resilience and creative power of sex workers. Or maybe dancing on a stick is just very fun, and it’s not that deep.
Between now and Christmas I’m going into a quieter period where I get to take lots of classes for my own training, and fully recentre what I love about pole. It settles my nervous system, soothes a lot of whirring noise in my head and gets me into a state where I’m happy, relaxed, and more attentive to things that I actually enjoy. SEXY STICK is magic and I’m stoked to bring more people into the cult ⚡️
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