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Would you be offended if…..
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I highly disagree w/ you Olivia, in a club, you can simply sit extremely slowly while grazing your hand down your leg, making eye contact and have a seductie smile on your face and the guy can say, wow, you've been pole dancing years. Ha-what makes someone sexy is different than what is usually exuded in the pole world(sad but true fact for many- as I hope to change that, but diff topic/thread all together). Anyway, if you take every move that you already do and elongate your lines, show confidence in your step, are correctly guided, you'll improve. Watch your own vid and think about what advice you would give yourself. Hope this helps.
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I'd be pretty offended at first. Echoing what's been said, he just doesn't really get it. I have had students tell me that their husbands told them their floor work wasn't sexy, lol. You should ask him what he was expecting.
AS far as the strip club correlation, men who have been to clubs do sometimes make the connection but I think it's more about the overall look and feel of the dance vs moves you and the girls were doing. Exotic dancers generally don't do a lot of tricks for a myriad of reasons (pole is slippy, pole isn't safe, pole tricks don't always equal $$.) I've never seen a beginner exotic dancer start out looking any different than pole students, either. We all start somewhere, we all feel awkward dancing around the cold steel pole. Heck, I see exotic dancers who have been dancing for awhile still look uncomfortable with the pole – progress and comfort are individual. Some of the exotic dancers I know who really aren't into pole also make big bucks because they love to chat, talk and hustle.
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Flip the comment on its head, take it as a compliment! Since when is it insulting or offensive to be called a beginner or an amateur, if that's what you are? And it sounds like that's how he meant it, not as ANY kind of slam but just an observation. Don't read more into it than he meant, especially if he's told you what he meant.
There's nothing derogatory about the term "level 1" – it's pretty neutral. So yeah, he's stating the obvious, but it's your choice to take it personally or not. Let this roll off your shoulder and keep being the awesome "first-grader" you are. 🙂
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MzVelvet – it really was. But he said it so fast, that he didnt mean to be mean,but that was what he thought about my poledance. Thats why I decided to let him discover the difficulty of pole 🙂
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MzV — you yourself said it best: he isn't worth all these thoughts. Love how you put that. I personally would think any dude that is gonna leave me w/that much doubt & discomfort, I'd be movin on… You seem like a sharp young hottie that is blossoming into a future bad-ass ("level 4", LOL!) pole dancer! Dang that sounds like a chickie that is worth a million bucks, so yeah, maybe that's this guy's loss…
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@sawyer venm, i like the way u put it. they dont undestand how much work we put in. we had to practice 8 weeks for our performace to just get a negative comment was not supportive at all.
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I don’t think it’s rude. It’s a statement, an observation ‘you can tell its level 1’ like ‘you can tell its blue’, well yes you probably can tell its level 1, but that’s not a bad thing, you might have kicked ass at level 1!!!
Men say what they mean there is rarely an alterior motivation to their comment.. -
There's something to remember because this comes up in aerial a lot, too. And from what I can tell, any technical discipline ever. For one thing, the good and experienced dancers make anything they are performing look really easy. It's not performance ready if it doesn't look easy. So right away, anyone watching a good performer, regardless of the performer's skill level, will react in a way telling them it must be easy (or at least, not horribly difficult), after all, it looks so easy.
Another thing that really gets me is that the unexperienced eye cannot distinguish between many of our pole tricks. Which isn't surprising, I remember watching trapeze videos before I ever started that blew me away, totally and completely. Now, when I find a trapeze piece I love, I usually love it for its technicality, for knowing just how hard it is, the complexity of transitions, the musicality etc. Basically, the average person might not really see the difference in scorpio or gemini, split grip vs elbow grip, and they definitely don't know how much working for all the skills hurts or the time it takes. I read about a Cirque du Soleil juggler talking about how when jugglers get technically really difficult, and audience can't appreciate it the way other jugglers can. Because an audience can't tell the difference in juggling 5 balls or 7 balls. But there's a huge technical difference there. If one asked people after the show about the juggler, all they remember about the show was WHAT he was juggling (balls, rings, clubs). Not how many. Not how difficult.
In combination, both of these things make the average person watching performances not particularly capable of determining the skill level of a person. It's good and bad. It means a performance can be great without being technically really difficult. Because performances are so much more than just technical skill, usually. But it also means that if you bust your ass for a move, perform it when its ready, absolutely no one in the audience is going to know how damn hard it was to get, and they might clap more for something you didn't have to work for at all. Something you got the first time you tried it so you put it in your piece as a resting point. Ugh. That used to happen with trapeze a lot to me.
Bottom line. I wouldn't think its a big deal. There's nothing wrong with being level one. Everyone was at one time. Most people not involved in performance arts don't have a frame of reference for the difficulty of performance art.
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