Pole dance

Pole dance requires significant muscular endurance, coordination, strength, flexibility, upper body and core stability, as well as sensuality.

Dancer Remy Redd at the King of Diamonds, for example, is famous for flipping herself upside down into a split and hanging from the ceiling.

The video featured Presley's famous gyrating hips as well as numerous pole slides, grinds, and twirls.

Since the 1980s, pole dancing has incorporated athletic moves such as climbs, spins, and inversions into striptease routines, first in Canada and then in the United States.

In the 1990s, pole dancing commenced being taught as art by Fawnia Mondey, a Canadian who moved to Las Vegas, US.

[16] Since then, pole dancing classes have become a popular form of recreational and competitive sport, practiced and performed in a variety of sexual, non-sexual, and athletic settings.

[19] Dance poles that are permanent are fixed to the ceiling supported by a beam located in the roof, and they are set to the floor by different brackets and bearings.

Pole dancing has gained popularity as a form of exercise with increased awareness of the benefits to general strength and fitness.

[30][31] Pole dance competitions began in the United States with the Deja Vu chain of strip clubs in 1991 with an event called the Po'Lympics, which was held annually throughout the decade.

The first "Miss Pole Dance World" competition was held in November 2005 in Amsterdam and Elena Gibson from the UK won the championship.

The following day Elena was disqualified by the organizer John Benner amongst much controversy and the title went to the runner up Reiko Suemune from Japan.

[33] A group of advocates pushed for pole dance to be represented as a test event in the 2012 London Olympics.

[34][35] However, since this was a relatively new trend, there was no standardized scoring for competitions and technique descriptions vary among clubs in different regions at that time.

Actress Sheila Kelley was so taken with the sport, which she learned while preparing for her role in Dancing at the Blue Iguana, that she launched her pole-based exercise program.

[42][43] Rima Fakih's victory at Miss USA 2010, including the fact that she had won a pole-dancing competition three years earlier, attracted media attention.

[44] Taiwanese pop singer Jolin Tsai showed her pole dancing skills in the music videos of "Agent J" and "Beast".

In the video game Bayonetta, the titular character uses pole dancing to advance to the next area or combat her foes.

Ga-In of the Brown Eyed Girls included a few shots of her pole dancing in the music video of her 2012 solo single "피어나 (Bloom)".

In 2015, Celebrity Health & Fitness magazine reported "royal bodyguards" as saying that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge took pole dancing lessons to lose weight after giving birth to Prince George in 2013.

On the social media platform Instagram, some pole dancers try to differentiate between their exercise method and the technique's origin by using "not a stripper" as a hashtag.

Focused on the lives of strippers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the film cast members of the New York stripping community, including rap icon Cardi B and Lizzo.

[54] Jennifer Lopez performed intricate routines in the film—notably to Fiona Apple's "Criminal"—and went on to pole dance in the 2020 Super Bowl.

After the release of the film and Lopez's subsequent interviews, pole dancing studios nationwide saw a surge in registrations.

Pole dancer performing in 2015
Pole dancer performing
Pole dancer using a street pole
A home version stage pole
Pole dancing demonstration near the Idaho State Capitol
Chinese pole acrobats perform