My last open studio session

Shortly before quarantine, in March 2020, I attended one last open dance studio session. Open studio times allow dancers to use a large space, with dance floors and equipment, for individual training, rehearsing, or just moving, instead of taking a class. Reserving spaces in open studio times is also generally cheaper than reserving spaces in classes. The space that I rented for an hour was around a pole in a studio that was once named Phoenix (but is no longer). The rental area: well over six feet by six feet. Far more space than my tiny Temescal apartment offered, a space that I was about to be confined in while my father died hundreds of miles away.

The tension before quarantine rippled—uncertainty about the virus, the response, the spread. I was still working as a teaching assistant for a university creative writing class, still surrounded by people on campus, still living a life that I recognized. Still going to my usual studio for open pole sessions between classes. My focus: not the aerial tricks I do now, but flowing around the bottom of the pole in seven inch stilettos. Pants on dancing. Floorwork like fake splits from a sexy downward dog in heels. Leg clocks where I lay propped on my elbows while my heels rotated in the air like minute and second hands counting the analog hours. There is a stigma associated with this kind of dance; the internet will tell you that low flow is less athletic than tricks closer to the ceiling. Trick-flation, the inflation of difficult gymnastic moves up the pole (often fueled by the gross and whorephobic #notastripper crowd who care more about lifting than lines), led to dancers abandoning the floor, and their foundational moves.

The athleticism of low flow can be seen in the cardio, strength, and flexibility of using the pole to get up, usually ass-first, and using the pole to come back down in various aesthetic ways. For one: putting the pole where the shoulder meets the neck, hands on the pole above the head, knees bent in a wide straddle squat, and body waving, then raising one leg to wave with the body until the booty reaches the floor. Another: coming up through a deep lunge, only to slide down in drop splits. Pole dancing travels up and down as it circles. The large studio space accommodates sweeping legs coming together at the shoes’ toe boxes and the echoing clack that results from their controlled collision. Accommodates for shoulder rolls and twerking. But you remain in your circular space; there is no diagonal across the floor combo, filling the whole studio, like in a jazz class. There are invisible planets around dancers at individual poles. The studio gives you the expanse of a solar system, but you must be aware of others’ orbits and rotations, if all the poles are filled at your open studio time.

My last open pole time was sparsely populated, with fewer planets than models that illustrate earth’s solar space. There were other clacks, music picked by someone else, but room to move, room to set up a camera that would capture only me (so many of my low flow videos I never posted publicly because I didn’t have consent from the other people in the shot). I have a clip of freestyle from that session on YouTube and below are some stills of leg clocks from the video:

These captured moments remind me of inescapable transience. The studio was sold, renamed, renovated. Those leggings ripped and the straps of those shoes broke; I threw them away. That hair dye has been outgrown; perhaps none of the same hairs remain six years later. My eyesight worsened and I had to get new glasses. The world shut down. My dad passed in Florida while I was quarantined in Oakland. I used the pandemic money from the government to buy my own pole and haven’t had the money to go back to in-person pole classes or open studio times since. I now climb to the ceiling, avoiding the carpet that I hate in my current apartment, doing tricks I could have never done before the pandemic because I can practice more frequently on my home pole. But I miss stretching out my heeled legs on a dance studio floor, moving within a dancer galaxy.

I miss opening 
up in open studio: 
a blossoming star.

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