Vertical poles and pillars of various kinds have been an integral part of dance, sport and rituals throughout the world since the 12th century. The roots of modern pole dance began in Chinese circus and the Indian sport Mallakhamb. During the 20th Century, poles were often used in strip tease, shifting the perception of pole dance in a more erotic direction, but the sport and art form remain.
Modern pole dance has evolved from all of these, but also from gymnastics and ballet. Combining acrobatics, circus, and dance, the art requires technical knowledge of the human body, not to mention good physical form and condition, yet seems to the audience often quite effortless and lighter than air. Pole dance has spread among hobbyists in the past 20 years, during which time it has also evolved professionally. We had the fortune to talk with Noora Juppi, who participated in the 2024 Oulu Dance Hack, giving the event a more vertical perspective with the introduction of pole dance.
TAIKABOX: Can you tell us something about the development of young Noora as a performer? How did you find pole dance, and how did it take over?
Noora: At the time, I was a circus hobbyist, and it so happened that a Latin dance school in Oulu started giving lessons in pole dancing, which also included training to become a tutor. So, they started asking for people who would be interested in this and could possibly teach pole dance later on. They asked our circus whether there would be anyone, and I remember that it was then when I had my first pole dance lesson with someone sent from Helsinki to teach us. This was some twenty years ago, and that school of latin dance probably isn’t there anymore.
I was probably sixteen or seventeen with no knowledge whatsoever of what pole dancing was, I went there just to get an idea of it all. And then I went to Lahti to study circus arts for a couple of years, during which time I met the owner of a pole dance school in Helsinki, and I was asked if I wanted to teach. I started with couples acrobatics, and after a while moved on to teaching pole dancing. At that point, I didn’t really know what I was doing with the pole, and the students were probably more adept than I was – I was just faking it to make it! But I caught on pretty quick. This was in 2010 when I started, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
If you compare modern dance and circus, maybe the latter has the showmanship and liberating the artist from the ground level. But what was the thing about the pole as a tool in modern dance?
Well, before pole dance, my main form of circus was tightrope, and dance just has always been there for me. Circus just got selected as my main channel of expression, maybe I felt it had more elements I could use than just dance. And, I don’t think I’ve ever felt I’m a dancer per se, so maybe I just didn’t dare to take that path. Circus had a freedom to it, it had more possibilities, for some reason. And I just felt that the pole, compared to the tightrope, had so much more to explore. The tightrope is somehow two dimensional, it’s often seen from the side and you’re up there, stepping the line back and forth. The pole has you going up and down and around, and it combines the ground element with the air element. Pole is just more diverse as a tool.
Let’s talk about aesthetics for a bit. Myself, I see pole dance in connection to musical dynamics – there is a peaceful beginning that grows and suddenly a lot of things are happening with force, and then we go back to the beginning, being at ease. Is that always the case, or is there a general aesthetic of pole dancing?
Somehow I see that description more about aerial silk: first we climb up for quite a while, then twist the rope around ourselves, and then we come down. Myself, I’ve always been a quick mover – it has interested me for quite a while, and it’s always felt easy and natural. Although it has changed during recent years towards a slower way of being on the pole. But if you think of the pole as a device of expression, it’s impossible to keep high level intensity on that. The change in tempo is natural just because of the dancer and her physical peak.
I’ve never competed in pole dance sport events. I’ve only taken part in showcase events, and the rules are a bit less tight there. But sport events are very much like artistic gymnastics: there is a defined set of moves to complete in a certain amount of seconds, and certain positions must revolve around the pole, two full circles, all that. It is very very precise how the movements are to be made, in what position – how’s your finger during that bit, and so on. What I do is nowhere near that approach.
When you say you haven’t competed in sport events, is that because it’s too limiting, or because it’s too intensive and exhausting?
Well, all of those. I don’t have the physical capacity to make it on a level that the competitions require and the moves they have these days. But I also feel it’s limiting for me personally. The way I experience pole dancing is artistic, and that is sport – the juxtaposition of that is too obvious. Some showcases I have done, which by definition are more artistic, even those are too limiting – still they tell you to perform these moves, have this theme, use the stage like this.
I think if you make art, it should have as much freedom as possible for self-expression, and I am pretty critical about the ways many pole art showcase organisers arrange these. It doesn’t really help pole dancing evolve as an art form.
How popular is pole dancing among hobbyists today?
I have absolutely no idea. In Helsinki alone there are around ten pole dance schools, which is way more than when I started – there were two or three then. I don’t know how that relates to the amount of hobbyists, but in most towns there is at least one pole dance school.
The pole is pretty easy to approach in the beginning, unlike, say, aerial silk, which demands a lot of strength, you really can’t stay up there when you’re inexperienced. Aerial silk is hard in a different way, it stresses your body differently. But getting started on the pole is pretty quick. It can be approached by various age groups and you can do it in a number of ways.
If you want to get further but get stuck on a plateau, what would you recommend to move forward? 500 ab crunches every day?
Fitness improvement is crucial to getting better – push-ups, belly crunches, pull ups. The next level from beginner upwards is a lot more physical. For instance, people with a background in artistic gymnastics or sports in general, they naturally move forward faster. I’ve hit a wall during these ten years of professional pole dancing – many times. I’ve had quite a few problems with my shoulders, like many pole dancers do, and that naturally limits a lot of what I want to do in order to protect my body, to prevent the pole from breaking things further.
When I was a graduating circus student, injuries or health issues were big things, but doing this series of works last spring, the whole season was affected by my shoulders hurting all the time, and it limited the choreography a lot. It was a fruitful lesson on doing what you can, a big thing meditatively – to accept that limitation.
About the meditative side, how does pole dancing work for you in your mindset?
I don’t think it’s meditative in itself per se, but it’s possible to practise as part of the meditative context, as sort of being present. I did a piece some time ago where the motivation for movement was to produce sound [the second event of the Lovely series]. The move or movement itself was irrelevant, but the squeaks and breaths when you do it was the thing – what sounds pivoting or getting into position created. There were some pretty good soundscapes in that one. The idea behind the whole Lovely series was meditation and enjoyable meditative experiences, like awareness and connecting.
The first part of this series consisted of six participatory pieces, and it ran the whole of Spring 2024. The goal was to bring some meditative experience to both audience and creator. In November we will perform a stage piece, which is called “Sisäänhengityksen keskivaiheilla tuntuu silkkiseltä” [freely translated to “Halfway breathing in the feeling is silky”] The goal of that is to make meditative experiences more of the body, more stage-oriented.
Have your details or the methods of creating a performance changed over the years?
It took me a while to reach the state of mind and self-confidence to become a full time pole dance artist. When I was younger, I didn’t really strive to be a professional artist – teaching was always there, alongside performing, and it was something I could lean on. I became a performing artist around 2020, and I think that, had I done that earlier, even if my body would have had a different pool of capacities to take from, I felt strongly that I had to turn 30 before the confidence and trust to my capabilities reached a certain level to perform as a full time artist. When I was younger, the mind and the body were kind of apart from each other, now they are more in sync, and that allows me to be in this line of work.
Often, when you’ve done something for a long time, the focus shifts from the bigger picture of how the movement is made towards the subtle things – how your ankle is at a certain point, or how your head is in context of the movement in question. It reminds me of a quote from Picasso, something about him learning his whole life to paint like a child. For instance, in circus training you learn to precisely align your body with a certain aesthetic, and at some point you start focusing on how the body aligns naturally. Over the last few years, this sort of direction has started to interest me more.
But I’ve always been more interested in movement in general than specific moves. I’ve always been a little lazy to train those, I’ve deliberately swum against the current. But, a few years ago I started thinking that I could train this technique as well, doing moves that aren’t that interesting to me aesthetically. It’s actually quite fun to get back to the basics and not think that move has to be used one day – I just have that move now, nothing more.
Does the passing of time affect your performances? The strain on the muscles can be quite rough at times.
About five years ago, I felt that I had to temporarily let go of the hard pole training, where some muscles are used heavily in order to move in a certain direction. I started studying contemporary dance, so I could utilise that with the pole. But the way of doing things is different in contemporary dance, and this meant that I had to unlearn some sinewy ways of pole dance, for a moment at least. So even if you think that it’s a great idea to combine contemporary dance with pole dance, it is really hard to keep it up, let alone develop your body towards contemporary while you’re doing pole.
After that I have found interesting directions for that combo, for instance keeping one part of your body taut and relaxing another part. It’s interesting, but it increases the risk of injury a lot – where’s the control? Where’s the support coming from? That kind of thing. I’m still struggling with it. And since I’m doing the pole with methods like these, to some viewers it just looks technically wrong, even if I, as an artist, have a very precise vision of what I want to achieve with it. And I still don’t know if the idea of softening movement on the pole is really that good for the body.
And then there’s ageing and how it affects your physique. Have you had to think of these things?
Well, while years pile on, I’ve had to consider a little of the direction I’m heading to. I’ve done some Butoh now, and it has changed a little how I find movement, the body, and performing in relation to everything. The expressive and the inner vision of how to do things are so present in Butoh.
I’m interested in doing more choreography – I have choreographed for some pole dance artists, and for myself, of course. But even if I start going down that path, I still want to perform.
When I was studying circus, the idea of soon turning twenty, while the pension age for a circus professional is around 23 – that was always in the back of my mind. And when I was studying contemporary dance and I was pushing 30, no one mentioned it at all. I was talking to a professional circus colleague friend a while ago, and we got talking about how the career path for both of us has been pretty similar, that we have only recently become performing professional artists, and it’s wonderful that we’re barely in the beginning of it. Someone can come to us and ask “But you’re almost forty, isn’t it time to pack it up?” And we’re like: this whole thing is just starting now, what are you talking about?
Noora Juppi was talking online with Pasi Pirttiaho