The Simple Physics of Pole Dancing

[Jennifer Ouellette | Gizmodo]

It's the last day of Senior Week at Gizmodo, and this is my confession: I am a huge pole dancing fan. Something about the combination of dance and acrobatics, athleticism and grace, gets me every time. Plus it's sexy as hell-but only if it wants to be, slut-shamers be damned.

I am also a huge physics fan, and pole dancing is chock-full of basic physics. Angular momentum, center of mass, friction, levers, static equilibrium-it's all there. “This is straight-up Physics 101,” Rebecca Thompson, a physicist who heads up public outreach for the American Physical Society, told me after viewing some of the sample videos I sent her. “I could find a corollary for all these problems in any introductory physics textbook.” That is a physics class I would love to take.

Chances are when you you think of pole dancing, the mental picture you summon is this:

Demi Moore trained for months before strutting her stuff in Striptease (1996).

And you wouldn't be wrong. It's true that there is a strong pole dancing contingent among strippers and exotic dancers-hence the stereotype. But that's a fairly recent trend, historically speaking. The practice, in some form, has been around for hundreds of years. There's an Indian sport called mallakhamb (loosely translated: “pole gymnastics”), for instance, wherein the performer executes feats of strength and endurance using a wooden pole. The Chinese version used by acrobats features two or more poles, and the acrobats perform tricks while leaping from pole to pole, like this:

In the US, pole dancing acts were common in circuses and sideshows during the 1920s, but it's generally accepted that the apparatus didn't make it into actual strip clubs until 1968, when a woman named Belle Jangles took to the pole at the Mugwump Strip Club in Oregon. By the 1980s it was a fixture in striptease routines, and soon there were pole dancing competitions popping up all over the world.

The US Pole Dance Federation Championship (USPDF) held its first competition in 2009, complete with colorful, scanty outfits and five-inch heels for the performers, in keeping with those strip club roots. You may even recognize a couple of the basic moves from the Chinese acrobat video above.

But you don't need those trappings to appreciate the strength and artistry involved. Here's the 2009 USPDF champion (and former Cirque du Soleil aerialist), Jenyne Butterfly, performing at a pole dancing convention two years later. She's barefoot and dressed in simple black workout clothes, the better to highlight her impressively toned physique and jaw-dropping athleticism:

Butterfly's routine could provide some of those textbook physics problems should Thompson ever decide to teach this in a class. The basics of pole dancing are spinning around the pole (angular momentum) and climbing up the pole (friction and gravity).

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