JULY/AUGUST 2020
OUT OF STUDIO
Photo shoots during COVID-19
ANDREW NEMR
Vancouver Tap Dance Society
POLE DANCING Digging into the stigma
Display until September 2, 2020 / $8.25
feature profile
Welcome to
Nemr / Photos by Bret Hartman
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the dance current JULY/AUGUST 2020
Tap Dance Land Andrew Nemr brings tap forward by embracing the form’s joyful, yet painful, history by philip szporer
Andrew Nemr, artistic and executive director of the Vancouver Tap Dance Society, or VanTap as it’s popularly known, offers some sage advice: “Just dance from your heart.” He’s devoted to bringing people together, audiences and artists alike, to what he calls “tap dance land.”
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photo essay
OUT OF STUDIO
What does dance look like during a global pandemic? 24
the dance current JULY/AUGUST 2020
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feature
Spinning Around Stigma
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
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the dance current JULY/AUGUST 2020
Pole dancing requires an incredible amount of strength and endurance, but the form remains controversial by kendra guidolin
W
hile waiting with some students in the lobby of a beautiful, brand-new dance studio between classes, a newly ten-year-old student approaches me with her hands behind her back. She offers me a page in a magazine showing a woman framed by a sunset landscape. The woman is holding herself upside down on a pole, in a split and hanging on by just one arm. I later learn this is called a jade split. I can tell my student is unsure about the photo; she and her friend giggle like they’ve overheard a scandalous secret. “Yes, that’s pole dancing,” I tell them. They look at each other, as though they know something I don’t. I’ve seen this hesitance before, typically from people outside the dance industry who look down on pole dancing. I explain to them what I know about pole at the time: that it’s a lot like acrobatics, that it requires an incredible amount of physical strength, that tons of people do it all the time either professionally or for fun and fitness. “I’d like to try it one day,” I say, and still, they look scandalized. I ask them why they think it’s different from the kind of dancing we do in the studio, and they laugh, as though the suggestion of ballet and acro being even remotely similar to what this woman was doing was ridiculous. By just looking at the photo of the woman, I can tell pole dancing shares a lot of common ground with the technique from the classes these students take regularly, like pointed toes, straight knees, flexibility, strength without restricting the quality of movement. So, why does pole dancing carry with it a harmful stigma that often places dancers and instructors in a degrading
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