While I have been really slacking on my blog recently, that doesn’t mean I have been slacking on the pole. Last Saturday was my first official pole recital at the Secret Pole Dance Studio. The theme was “SKIN” with acrobatic pole tricks, bootylicious and fierce exotic dance numbers, and sexy spicy hip hop and dancehall routines. Both shows were completely sold out with over 200 people in the audience. I have been practicing a routine for over two months with a group of 7 other girls and Janet our instructor. There have been up to 4 classes every week including Janet’s amazing stretch class at Culver and evening rehearsals on Sundays. Janet also specializes in the spinning pole which takes a bit of getting used to. I haven’t posted much before partly because I wasn’t supposed to give away spoilers, but also I have been too busy. But now it is done and there will be plenty of pictures and video.
The most important part of a good routine is the song. Janet chose the song “Sexercize” by Kyle Mingue.
I have to admit it is a very silly song. The song is a dubstep tribute to 80’s workout videos filled with double entendres about burning calories through sex. Except they are not very good puns. As one reviewer pointed out, do you really want your lover to beat “all their best times”? The song was written by Australian singer Sia better known for her own “Chandelier” (which would also make an even better great pole dancing song). Still, “Sexercize” is fun and rather appropriate for a class where you are working to get fit and sexy at he same time. We played up the 80’s style with neon colors and glowing black lights. As someone who is more athletic than flexible it also fit my own style of dance.
What sets Janet’s choreography apart from all the other instructors is that she has everyone dancing at once, either doing a floor routine or taking turns on the three spinning poles. We were divided into three groups. I was in group two with Brittany. I start on the floor doing sets of push-ups and side crunches before moving to the pole where I perform a spinning outside leg hang, transition into an inverted pike, then climb up into a final flag. The hard part was trying to judge how fast to spin. If you went too fast you had to fight the centrifugal force and were in danger of getting too dizzy and falling down. If you didn’t spin fast enough then you might stall. To make it more difficult, we rehearsed in the Secret’s old smaller studio where the ceilings weren’t as high and the pole didn’t spin as fast. Janet recorded each weeks routine. I am not going to show you the early weekes as we looked like a group of very clumsy girls doing random exercises instead of dancing but slowly we developed some sense of rhythm and synchronicity. Here is our final dress rehearsal, one week before the show:
Not bad!! I don’t have the video from the actual show yet, though it will be on Youtube eventually. I just have some pictures from the night. All the performers were packed into the back room at the Hawthorne Studio. Over 70 girls were performing in 12 routines plus solos from some of the instructors. Each of us had to grab our little square foot of floor space while everyone else was running around changing costumes, curling their hair, fixing their makeup. And there was only one bathroom!! At least we is was a dance studio so there is at least one giant mirror. There was a lot of skin everyone which puts a lot of pressure on you to compete. It is hard to hide your imperfections in little more than a sports bra. Yet in the end it is all about confidence. No matter what I looked like, I felt sexy.
The only thing missing was puppets. I’ve never seen Miss Piggy pole dance but she did have her own 80s exercise video “Snackercize” … c’mon baby snack snack!!
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