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Dancing VS Tricks
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I like a good mix between the two. Like Charley said, I can get tired watching both of just that one thing.
I like to use tricks for emphasis, like the WOW factor to my routines. Ive been dancing my whole life so just to dance freely comes very natural to me. I never feel like I have enough tricks/spins/holds in my routines.
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I'm with PoleKitten. Dance can get boring, I like the tricks and the strength involved in doing them. It's exciting to see a new combination or way to get into something. We dance to warm up but after that it's all about the tricks 🙂
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I used to be more about tricks but lately I've centered my focus on dance flow and incorporating both dance and tricks in my free style practice. I enjoy a combination of both now as I too get bored watching when there is too much of one thing. I am really admiring routines that excentuate dance flow as a basis and have some graceful trick execution as the "whipped cream" and "cherry" on top of the whole routine for the perfect combination. Those types of routines are much more appealing to me and I am always finding something new and interesting that I can take away from them and utilize in my own practice. https://www.studioveena.com/img/smilies/icon_heart1.gif
mmm after that now I want some icecream..LOL https://www.studioveena.com/img/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif
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Kobajo – I can totally tell you've been working on flow too – you looked great at the showcase and had the perfect mixture of dance and tricks 🙂
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Right now i'm 80% dance and 20% spins and tricks. I'd like to get to the point where I am 60% dance and 40% tricks though. When i watch pole dancers i like 50% dance & 50 % tricks but I must say that I am blown away by girls who are trixters too that hardly dance because doing back to back tricks is no joke and takes alot of skill. But I do get bored quickly with that, so more often than not, I can watch a poler longer if she has a nice balance of both in her routine.
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Wow. So many varied opinions! This is what keeps pole interesting…. diverse individual styles. I guess it partly depends on what your motivations and attitudes towards pole dancing is; Do you see it as a fitness program or sport (Strength and tricks) or do you value it more for the artistic/aesthetic side of dance (so lines, movement, flow etc)? I supposed the ideal is a harmonious combo of the two… It's interesting to hear what comes naturally to some and not others though…. I find that building strength is such a slow and laborious process, while the dancing is just so fun and easy for me. But I know others just master trick after trick but find things like floorwork and body rolls incomprehensible…. haha. Of those who naturally have muscles of steel – I am soooooooo jelo, but I dont think I'd trade in my natural groove for it. Back to the wights for me! 🙂
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Wow. So many varied opinions! This is what keeps pole interesting…. diverse individual styles. I guess it partly depends on what your motivations and attitudes towards pole dancing is; Do you see it as a fitness program or sport (Strength and tricks) or do you value it more for the artistic/aesthetic side of dance (so lines, movement, flow etc)? I supposed the ideal is a harmonious combo of the two… It's interesting to hear what comes naturally to some and not others though…. I find that building strength is such a slow and laborious process, while the dancing is just so fun and easy for me. But I know others just master trick after trick but find things like floorwork and body rolls incomprehensible…. haha. Of those who naturally have muscles of steel – I am soooooooo jelo, but I dont think I'd trade in my natural groove for it. Back to the wights for me! 🙂
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**weights
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I love a balance of both…I disagree with Charley…You DO have a great flow of both! I’m a dancer. I do flow, I do move my body naturally. But honestly…I don’t have more pole tricks simply because I don’t feel good enough to flow them into my dance. That’s what I’m working on right now. Not that I cant do them…I just want them to flow as naturally as a transition…without pause. It’s a challenge…especially when you are into your music, and mostly freestyle…it’s hard to throw a trick in there. But thats the great part of poling..to challenge yourself out of your comfort zone.
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I love a balance of both…I disagree with Charley…You DO have a great flow of both! I’m a dancer. I do flow, I do move my body naturally. But honestly…I don’t have more pole tricks simply because I don’t feel good enough to flow them into my dance. That’s what I’m working on right now. Not that I cant do them…I just want them to flow as naturally as a transition…without pause. It’s a challenge…especially when you are into your music, and mostly freestyle…it’s hard to throw a trick in there. But thats the great part of poling..to challenge yourself out of your comfort zone.
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I do and watch more dance and transitions than tricks. Like some say, anyone can do tricks but not everyone can dance with that fluid movement.
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My absolute favorite pole dancer to watch is Felix Cane, because she is so fluid and graceful that while her routines are mostly tricks, they look like dance to me. (This video is a great example of what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUOmIQ269-E) Plus, even when she is on the pole for a while she really knows how to grab the audience's attention through her stage presence and eye contact, which is normally what the dance part of the routine is supposed to do (I mean as far as making the audience feel like part of the performance, aside from wowing them with trick after trick).
It is hard to say that a routine should be this percentage tricks and that percentage dance because every dancer moves differently, and everyone is at a different level – I know that part of Felix's skill in making the tricks look like dance is that she's so advanced (and flexible!) – she has a lot more moves in her repertoire and has had a ton of experience performing for large audiences. It's much harder when you only know a couple tricks. But still, everyone can work on stage presence (eye contact!) and flow, which I would argue doesn't necessarily have to be in the transitions – it's also how you perform the trick itself, and how the timing of it fits into the routine.
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On the subject of dancing, I must first say that I do not hold with those who feel that dancing is something which is only performed on the floor. Just because one does not have feet on the floor moving oneself does not mean one is not dancing. By this logic, we could also consider the traditional movements in Ballet, such as "arabesque," "pirhouette," or the numbered foot positions to be ballet "tricks." In general, I try to avoid the word "trick" in my pole dance vocabulary because I feel that it can be easily misconstrued.
When I think of a routine which is "all tricks and no dance," I think of a particular competitive routine I watched which followed a rigid trick, floor, trick formula. I remember watching the routine and thinking, "does this woman think her audience is stupid?" I do not enjoy watching trick reels, but I greatly enjoy watching smooth transitions between a sequence of different aerial poses, and I consider a sequence of aerial poses strewn together to be a "dance."
So the differentiation I'm making is that , for example, after performing any kind of handspring from the floor (such as cartwheel, phoenix, tg lift), I can do a handstand sequence and then bring my feet back down to the floor, or I can hook a leg on the pole to use that handspring to initiate a combo. In other words, I feel that if someone touches the floor in between all of their "tricks," this is not dancing. On that same note, when trying to understand the mentality of those who feel that the aerial acrobatics of pole are not dancing, and I watch the pole dancing floorwork which is most common and popular, I on the other hand ask myself, "which part of this dance is the 'pole' part?"
Lately I have been challenging myself to spend more time on the floor and to do more interesting things with my floor time, rather than using popular floor maneuvers as a way of staying in motion to help myself feel less awkward there. However even if my performances became 50% floor and 50% aerial, I would still hope to see the video thereafter and feel confident that I "danced" through all of the performance. In fact, I have started specifying between "aerial dancing" and "grounded dancing" with students and other people. So in short, I enjoy aerial dancing and I enjoy grounded dancing when they are executed fully, instead of a trick reel or instead of a grounded dance using a pole as a prop.
Last, I think its somewhat sad when I see video comments (usually by women and on other women's videos) which are to the effect of "this is an amazing video, but it isn't sexy. Where's the sexuality in this?" This implies that pole dancing isn't merely a dance which integrates a specific apparatus, but it's a dance with that apparatus designed to be seductive. I find it a bit disheartening to see women make these remarks about one another and equally disheartening that there seems to be a double-standard which allows men to be primarily acrobatic while women are expected to do seductive dancing. In general, I feel that the (intentionally) sexy part of pole dancing is usually done on the floor, and that the actual pole part of the pole dance does not lend itself to coital or anatomical suggestiveness/mimicry. But I feel that expectations should be across the board instead of promoting old neanderthal ideas about gender roles which have kept women opressed for aeons. It would make me happy to see more women being more supportive of one-another and their individual pole dancing styles regardless of whether they are more acrobatic or more suggestive, and do less "excusing" of men just because we are presently a minority in the pole community. As artists and athletes who have chosen the pole as our medium, it seems logical that we would all want to become very well rounded in all our movements, whether we are dancing on the floor or some distance over it.
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I agree with StellarMotion, the dance is in everything. Doing tricks is one thing, dancing them is another. Being able to link them together on the pole and with floorwork is pole dancing. Otherwise it's just pole tricks and that might be impressive but not that captivating to watch as a show.
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I personally love the dance "expression" on the floor as floorwork and also as transitions. BUT now that I can only dance with one foot, I have decided to challenge myself to try and "dance" or express myself while ON the pole. I now have the height on my pole for it so I'm hoping to accomplish that. https://www.studioveena.com/img/smilies/icon_cheers.gif
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