‘We risked our lives for £250’: how pole dancing exploded out of strip clubs and became serious art

With abs like Olympians and skin like hide, pole dancers are besieging the Edinburgh fringe.

We meet four high-flying, physics-defying acts tackling everything from New York’s underbelly to neurodiversity If you tell someone in Edinburgh you’re going to see a pole dancing show, they might direct you towards the so-called Pubic Triangle, where the city’s strip clubs are.

But there’s more to pole dance than that – and it’s popping up in theatre shows across the fringe this year.

Not only do these acts show off amazing physical feats, they also tell stories that range from one woman’s HIV diagnosis, to the relationship between a neurodivergent mother and son.

Since the boom of the 1990s, when Zoe Ball famously had a pole in her living room, pole has been taught at dance studios, has become a competition sport – there’s a campaign to get it into the Olympics – and made its way from cabaret stages to theatres.

It’s an impressive and fiendishly difficult art.

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