Where does pole dancing come from and what is its history? These simple questions often turn pole dance Facebook groups and conversations among pole dancers into a culture war. In this blog post, I use multiple sources to trace the international history of pole and to pay tribute to its foremothers: strippers.
There are a few reasons for that, and the first one is selfish: I wanted one on my blog. I am a history nerd, and I wanted to do some history nerding about my favourite thing and my job, pole dancing. Another push to write this blog came from the fact that not all my audience is pole-specific, and that they often ask me about the history of pole. Many pole dancers know that teaching and experiences differ country by country, and I wanted this post to reflect that.
I was interested in stringing these countries together, tracing the history of pole there where available. Email me at bloggeronpole gmail. When discussing the ancient origins of movement similar to pole dancing, PolePedia and a set of polers talk about tribal dances in Africa, about the Maypole dance, about Mallakhamb and Chinese pole.
The latter two are the most cited examples by pole dancers who want to build a wall between them and stripping. While these are not the true origins of pole as we know it, they do deserve a mention when we talk about the history of modern pole dance, to show the nature of the debate.
The first practice quoted by PolePedia is the Maypole dance, a Pagan celebration of fertility to welcome spring or mid-summer. During the celebration, which spread to Germany, England, and Sweden, women held ribbons connected to the top of a large pole and danced in a circle to wind the ribbon together, to then retrace their steps to unwind it.
