If you want to be wowed by technical prowess, I recommend taking a trip to see a couple of New York pole dancers, Donna Carnow and Gina Alm, in their Edinburgh fringe show Dusk/Night/Dawn. The pair are wildly impressive performers with just one piece of apparatus, a hanging pole suspended above the stage, on which they climb and spin and balance seemingly on thin air and origami their limbs into impossible shapes, swimming and spiralling through the shadows in mesmerising fashion.
What they demonstrate is absolute mastery of their art, Carnow especially – a former dancer and US Pole Art champion. The movement is utterly fluid, despite the brute strength required; the physics of it is so finely tuned but you’re unaware because you’re lost in the flow. That’s what a great performer does, and Dusk/Night/Dawn is in part about performance. At one point their two bodies are writhing under flashing red light, smeared with black paint, and then suddenly the lights come up and it’s like waking up, they’re wiping themselves down, the act’s over. There are all sorts of slippery questions about the dissolving line between person and performer, the nature of fantasy, the pleasure of discovering the power of your own body, and there’s also just the awesome talent.
