Street Pole Dancing workshop for Greenroom Arts Centre: Manchester Sept 2007
The distance between a pavement to a pole is 90 degrees and it needs foremost a mental maybe even behavioural exercise to overcome this distance.
It took us many many years to realize that this mediocre street furniture has great joys to offer not only for people who utilize them as public notice boards/street galleries for sticking art or protest.
Street Pole Dancing is a discipline we invented on the streets of Bristol in summer 2007. Regular Street Pole Dancing jams were held together with Anushiye Yarnell, James Kennard and Heath Bunting. Street pole dancing marks a (vertical) beginning of our work in public as Varsity of Maneuvers.
Putting this blog and information on the web should encourage people and artists accross the globe to develop this practice further
Street Pole Dancing Jam through the streets of Bristol June 2007
Street Pole Dancing can be practiced by anyone, in solitude, yet it really makes more sense and is safer when people jam together, swopping 'moves', encouraging and inspiring each other.
'This everybody's discipline shall scythe and grime down greedy night club bosses, plundering talented people and betraying the desire of those, who sought yet will never reach carnal closeness.'
Taking these private movements out onto the streets might re-invent some of the gendered hierarchies in the use of public space from boys on boards and girls on heels to boys and girls on poles alike.
To facilitate an easier use of street poles for your local street pole dancing peers, add identification stickers to appropriate poles. Paying "pole taxes" to city councils towards pole maintenance would also help to improve the infrastructures of Street Pole Dancing.
On the left and right: stickers designed by Birgit Binder, July 2007
Some technical details for the curious
We believe that Street Pole Dancing is fit for being established as an independent discipline, that can be learned and practiced by anyone who is brave enough to appropriate urban infrastructures. You do not need to be a professional pole dancer, an acrobat or Parcour athlete.
This is due to its unusual movement vocabulary, which is informed and catalyzed not only through griming up and down on the pole, but the thick layer of grime (from pollution) covering it.
This trivial detail might not allow you to work them in evocative ways like shiny steel poles one finds in night clubs or wealthy areas in cities. The dirt layer on the lamp posts covers makes up for the gender issues a critical consciousness is confronted with in night clubs.
On the right Street Pole Dancing Workshop for Greenroom Arts Centre: Manchester, Sep 2007
As a Street Pole Dancer you aim at minimum skin contact with the pole. Legs, arms and torso should be covered because of potential injuries through the street pole's rough and irregular surface. Whilst jamming in public it is important to be safe rather than sexy.
Common pole dancers can make extensive use of the friction between skin and metal, like that they can be very acrobatic.
A similar acrobatic quality in Street Pole Dancing is reached through using your upper body muscles to lift the body away from the dirty pole towards the air.
After a while of practice you could start blurring spheres of night club and street, like Claire Rodderick in the picture, but beware not to burn yourself.
Street Pole Dancing Jam, on residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art: Galsgow Oct 07
Some context for the geeks
Another less rough form of Street Pole Dancing like Tube Pole Dancing is already emerging and will be researched by us shortly.
Both common and Street Pole Dancing share their roots with Maypole Dancing, which can be found in the UK, Germany, France and Sweden. It's origins date back to Germanic pagan culture.
Another cultural reference for this work is Chinese Pole, which is a very athletic form of moving up and down a pole. It belongs to the acrobatic repertoire of the Chinese Circus disciplines.
