Street Pole Dancing
Varsity of Maneuvers recently contacted the Urban Guide for Alternate Use with a simple introduction: "we have tried to use urban infrastructures and furniture in an alternate, lets say, tongue in cheek way".
Varsity of Maneuvers has an impressive portfolio of projects and research exploring our shared environments, and particularly our movement in shared space. The first one that really jumped out was their re-use of street sign posts as structures for pole dancing.
Street Pole Dancing - An Equal Opportunity Sport
As they explain on their Street Pole Dancing site:
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 can be practiced by anyone, in solitude, yet it really makes more sense and is safer when people jam together, swapping 'moves', encouraging and inspiring each other. 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.
With future alternate use opportunities in mind, they note: "Another less rough form of Street Pole Dancing like Tube Pole Dancing is already emerging and will be researched by us shortly."
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 1:04PM
Reader Comments (4)
If it gets people out onto the street and into their urban environment, I'm all for it. Perhaps the more tongue in cheek the better...And thanks to Varsity of Maneuvers for the valuable reminder about the grime element of street pole dancing!