It’s quiet up here on the top floor of the Commercial Iron works building on Shoreditch High Street, high above the noise of the street. The sturdy portico of St Leonard’s can be seen amongst the churchyard’s trees, through keyhole windows with spindly ironwork - made even more delicate by strong sunlight. At moments the room is still; the next all is movement and squeaks of skin on chrome. Friction is essential for the grips; unlike in the Chinese form where poles have a rubber coating and the performers are clothed. Seven poles are spaced in the room; four under the mezzanine are fixed by compression between floor and webbed girder. Floor space is marked out by black rubber squares. In the open height of the space freestanding poles project from black oblong plinths that conceal hefty counterweights, one has an elevated plinth exposing a splayed weighted mechanism. When clouds pass the sun warms the room as quick as it fades, sweat from the hands on a pole is a dancer’s problem.
Architecture and pole dancing could be though of as having a common enemy in gravity in the venture of trying to capture fantastic forms, a bit like flying elements found in a Gothic church.The dancers have to muster strength from every muscle to raise their body perpendicular to the pole, and aim for fluidity and weightlessness. It is also worth noticing how the dancers have to modify movements and sequences to avoid collisions with elements of the building and each other. The pole dancing studio was not purpose built, but customised in a way quite free from stylistic preoccupations, but also producing awkward adjacent activities.
There is no official story to how pole dancing came about, but a romantic speculation is that it originated in American in the early 1900’s at travelling tent shows, with striptease acts using the pole in the centre of the tent to dance around. A wonderfully precise sounding date of the earliest recorded pole dance is cited as 1968, when the artist Belle Jangles performance at Mugwump strip joint in Oregon. It was not until the 1980’s in Canada that it became popular in strip clubs. In the mid 90’s organised competitions and specialist schools took the underground dance out of strip clubs, and directed in more gymnastic and artistic forms.
The style of dance adopted at the London Pole Dance School best described as acrobatic, this session taking a jam format to invent new moves, or to replicate ‘sets’ found on Youtube. For the pole dancers, within all the grappling and clambering dismounts there is intrepid abandon in the perfection of a move. The dance techniques must be attacked with vigour and endurance requiring a concentration of force on a single featureless metal element. There is some competition in the mastery of the moves, not between the dancers - but against the time it takes to fall to the floor. Minute adjustments in approach and grip can transform a sequence from perilous to breathtaking.
So it would seem that the two disciplines are ripe for cross infection? This summer Brooklyn practice Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) will install a landscape entitled ‘Pole Dance’ into the courtyard of the MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre. It will consist of groups of tall poles on a 3m grid that are interconnected by bungee cords whose elasticity will cause the poles to sway and bounce under a stretched net roof. It is described as ‘a participatory environment that reframes the conceptual relationship between humankind and structure’ some pole performances did occur, but the design also allowed interaction with hammocks, sand pits and giant coloured balls for non dancers.
It was with a similar coyness, but more calculation John Ruskin re-instigated the May Queen ceremony while at Whitelands College in 1881 as an attempt to disassociate the May Pageant from its pagan origins. In its Victorian revival Maypole dancing was deliberately used to re-live a fantasy of ‘merrie England’. To refine what was basically a fertility rite colourful ribbons were added to the maypole tree trunk to weave and plat, and physically distance the dancers from the Maypole. As much as architecture has the vernacular, dance has the folk, and at fixed points an idealised atheistic or practice is revived. So in Brooklyn the poles will be dancing rather than danced on, in what will be a playful scene, but also highlights architecture’s tendency towards a pensive rather than a primal reflex, tentatively forming a relationship with a raunchy dance form.