How I started Pole Dancing At 42 Years Old

How I started Pole Dancing at 4

I didn’t start pole dancing and aerial dance until 2003, I was 42 years old. That was 19 years ago, (do the math). I know that may seem old to all you young folks out there, but dance has been my life since I could walk. My mom insists that I came out dancing. I have been professionally involved in all sorts of styles of dance from classical ballet to Brazilian samba, and a dance fusion style known as afro contemporary. I am the first one on the dance floor at a club and the last one to leave. Being able to express myself through movement, and in total harmony with music is where I feel the most at home. When words fail me it’s my body’s ability to project what I’m feeling in dance that gets me through the hardest times of my life!
I have extensive experience in various other forms of fitness and sports as well including gymnastics. In the past I coached the local high school girls gymnastics team for several years, as well as taught at the gymnastic school where my daughter took classes.
Around the time pole dancing came into my life I went to see a
Cirque du Soleil show. They had this amazing, sexy, flexible, strong woman performing on these incredibly high, bold crimson curtains. She was wearing a nude colored bodystocking and had her dark hair down. All I can say is that I wanted to be her at that moment. So totally in her body, so totally fearless, and so totally sexy! Pole dancing would eventually help me get a slice of that sexy, strong, but very female feeling!
I was offered a job at a pole dance studio that was opening in San Francisco. That meant that I would need to do some very intensive training over the course of a couple of months. I knew I would be a good teacher (I’ve had my personal trainer, and group exercise instructor certifications for 20 plus years) but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to ever do any of those cool tricks that I saw the other teachers doing, even with my gymnastics and dance background. The flying and spinning tricks looked so impossible, and I was just in awe any time I saw them done.
Once I was able to get on the dance pole and play I began to feel movement in a different way in my body. I began to love having this new element in my dance. Gravity is also such a key player in pole dancing, and I discovered quickly how to harness its energy. I love to feel myself pulling away from the pole, only to be pulled back into it to create the energy for spinning tricks. I love to feel its tug as I’m inverted. Exerting its force to coax me back down the pole to the floor, thus creating the constant ebb and flow of my dance with pole and floor, sometimes floor heavy, sometimes defying gravity and keeping my dance of the moment more pole connected. Ah, pure freedom.
My passion for movement, and in particular pole dancing, has taken me on a pretty incredible journey for the past nine years. I have met some very lovely people because of it. It has brought me to a place where I am now teaching for myself in a big beautiful studio in the SF Bay Area (with 12 twenty foot dance poles) and I am able to continue to create my own hybrid style of dance. I have helped found an award winning aerial burlesque dance group named Cirque Noir, we perform but we also teach and help women to realize their potential as performers. And lastly it has continued to allowed me to help women connect with a side of themselves they perhaps didn’t know existed. I have taught women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, and even a few men. No matter the age, shape, size, or gender they all can pole dance!
I will continue to dance, pole dance, teach, perform, and share as long as I am able. It is as much a part of me as breathing!!