You searched for julianna massa - Stance on Dance https://stanceondance.com/ Tue, 26 Nov 2024 19:34:16 +0000 en hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.5 https://stanceondance.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/favicon-figure-150x150.png You searched for julianna massa - Stance on Dance https://stanceondance.com/ 32 32 Empowered by Pole Arts https://stanceondance.com/2023/12/18/pole-arts-irlanda/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pole-arts-irlanda Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:36:40 +0000 http://stanceondance.com/?p=11560 Julianna Massa profiles her pole dance teacher Irlanda, a dancer, choreographer, stripper, scholar, archivist, and the co-owner of Black Widow Pole Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on her perspective of her own artistry as a dancer and the future of pole dance as a field.

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BY JULIANNA MASSA

Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2023 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

In April of 2021, I took my first Spin Pole 101 class with Irlanda at Black Widow Pole Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Six chrome poles line the floor of the studio, each one 14 feet tall, and sparkly Pleaser heels adorn the shelves. As a modern dancer, I was comforted by Irlanda’s cues to pull my belly button to the spine and imagine spreading the floor apart with my feet. When we started dancing with the pole, Irlanda’s cues suddenly became about squeezing and tension. I had to drop all my training in release technique in favor of holding onto the pole. I felt dizzy as I struggled through the next hour, fatiguing completely unfamiliar muscles. I went home and immediately purchased five more classes.

After that first class, I continued to learn at Black Widow. I’ve been lucky enough to train with Irlanda preparing for several performances at Black Widow as well as the Pole Sport Organization After Dark competition in Los Angeles in 2022. I won a silver medal in no small part due to her feedback and coaching. Irlanda’s pole dancing career spans silver and gold medal wins at Pole Sport Organization, competing in the experimental category at Haute Velour, and performing and teaching as part of the International Pole Convention’s first ever Latin showcase. Irlanda has a unique background as a dancer, choreographer, stripper, scholar, and archivist. In the summer of 2023, I interviewed Irlanda to hear her perspective on her own artistry as a dancer and the future of pole dance as a field.

Irlanda does a backbend on a pole. She is wearing a black bikini and gold Pleaser heels, and the background is blue.

Photo courtesy the artist

Irlanda first remembers dancing as a five-year-old, taking ballet classes at El Paso Community College with Ms. Lisa. When Ms. Lisa stopped teaching, Irlanda stopped taking classes, and didn’t dance again until college. At the University of Texas El Paso, Irlanda found her way back to ballet. From that point on, Irlanda wanted to dance, but like so many dancers, she did not have a clear path towards a professional dancing career while navigating money, identity, and relationships. After finishing her undergraduate degree in History and Anthropology, Irlanda earned a master’s in Library Science at the University of Arizona. As a sneaky way to keep training, she continued to take dance classes while completing her degree, writing about hip-hop and studying how countercultural movements become mainstream.

After graduate school, Irlanda moved to Albuquerque and worked as a visual resource librarian at the Bunting Visual Resource Library at University of Mexico School of Fine Arts. At the same time, she began to experience intense panic attacks. Through resources that were available to her as an employee at UNM, Irlanda began to work with a holistic therapist who encouraged her to find activities that engaged her frontal lobe. By that point, Irlanda had tried to convince herself to leave dance behind, only to find herself drawn back. As a college student, Irlanda had a stint as a stripper, where she was introduced to pole. Interested in exploring this part of her past more fully, she searched for pole dance classes. She began learning while in Albuquerque at Southwest Pole Dancing, a studio that has since closed, and immediately fell in love. Irlanda remembers feeling excited by the opportunity to once again have a movement practice that she could take seriously and approach with the kind of discipline that characterized her ballet training. Later, when she accepted a prestigious position as the university archivist at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center — the first woman of color to be in that role — she purchased her own pole, transformed her kitchen into a dance studio, and often traveled back to Albuquerque to take classes.

Irlanda left academia in 2017, and in 2020, she moved back to Albuquerque to work as a stripper and to open Black Widow Pole Arts with Johanna Chong. Their decision to use the term “pole arts” instead of “pole fitness” emphasized their commitment to pole as an art form. The studio’s mission explicitly asserts the importance of sensuality and moving with purpose and intent. Today, Black Widow has a staff of 11 instructors and hosts 32 classes a week, as well as performances and guest artist workshops.

Irlanda remembers how her ballet instructor at UTEP, Andree Harper, would bluntly tell her students that maybe just one of them would become a professional dancer. Still, Harper insisted on discipline and commitment to perfecting technique from every student. She taught the foundational elements that are offered to children learning ballet for the first time to her beginning adult dance students. Similarly, at Black Widow, Irlanda welcomes beginners who may or may not have any dance or movement background, and takes them seriously as dancers and artists. As a student in her Erotic Flow classes, I’ve learned to balance on the platforms of eight-inch Pleaser heels, push and pull on the pole at the same time to create a sense of suspension, and shift fluidly between tensing to hold onto the pole and releasing to melt onto the floor. While I’m dancing, I often hear Irlanda’s voice reminding me to be gooey, to milk the movement rather than rushing through the steps. Irlanda encourages students to approach their own practices with a kind of spiritual discipline – to pay close attention to the details not to achieve perfection, but to more deeply connect with their own embodied experience.

Irlanda does an upside down split while holding on to her pole. She is wearing a black bikini and gold Pleaser heels, and the background is blue.

Photo courtesy the artist.

Irlanda’s ballet training and archival work also show up in her performance work. In a recent choreography, Irlanda pushes her body away from the pole to execute a perfect cabriole, making a loud clack sound by bringing her Pleasers together, and then smoothly landing on the platforms to glide in a full circle around the pole. She creates the same kind of clear, clean lines that ballet dancers spend years perfecting, while performing a penché or hanging upside down from the pole. Alongside these moments, she weaves in skillful twerking, surprising drops to the floor, and languid, sensual floorwork —what is often referred to as “stripper style” — performed with the expertise that comes from years of experience in strip clubs. She frequently choreographs to 90s hip-hop and plays with the musicality of her movement to the lyrics and the beat.

In July of this year, Black Widow hosted the third annual Viva La Ganja featuring the Almighty Buda Crew, Irlanda’s pole dancing company/cannabis culture firm, which consists of students and instructors at Black Widow. In years past, Viva La Ganja has consisted of a series of solos choreographed by students to songs by West Coast hip-hop artists Cypress Hill. This year, Irlanda choreographed the entirety of the evening-length show to songs by Redman, almost like a ballet, with soloists, demi- soloists, and sections of group unison on and off the pole. According to the show’s program, Viva La Ganja is “intended to be a ritual to harness and push the energy necessary to bring about federal legalization of cannabis, with exoneration for all individuals charged with a federal possession or consumption charge.” This kind of larger scale thematic work is unique for a form that is usually performed exclusively in a solo format, with occasional instances of “doubles,” or having more than one person on the pole at the same time.

Although there are specific styles of movement and certification programs for instructors, pole dancing has no equivalent to Graham technique in modern dance or Cecchetti in ballet. Individual instructors and studios make their own determinations about correct ways to perform movements and progressions toward more advanced skills. Because of her background and expertise as an archivist, Irlanda is curious how the embodied knowledge created by pole artists will be passed down or remembered in the future. Irlanda believes that in the future, pole dancers will need to codify certain movement practices and strengthen or create institutional bodies in order to develop as a form. More importantly, she is interested in being able to create and maintain the kinds of archival material that would enable conversations and critical analysis of the history and development of pole dance.

During our conversation, we talked about the tension between the benefits of connections to institutions – respect and support – and the benefits of freedom from institutions – access and inclusion. The lack of codified technique can make space for adults who do not have a dance background to investigate their own movement in ways that go beyond what is usually offered for adult learners. Also, the centering of the erotic as an essential element of the form offers opportunities for embodied explorations that are de-emphasized or even stigmatized in other spaces. As a pole dancer, I have found value in experimenting with a form that is so focused on finding pleasure in self-expression. For the first time, my dance practice truly feels like it’s for me. At the same time, Irlanda wonders how moving toward codification and institutions would create barriers and change who could access pole dance. She specifically mentions that in a world where only people with advanced pole dancing skills could become strippers, many women would be pushed out of a well-paying job.

Through her work, Irlanda wants to create a world in which every person is free to express themselves fully, without fear of violence –- sexual or otherwise. I asked Irlanda how she feels about the argument that as pole increases in popularity, there is a simultaneous push to focus on the fitness elements of pole and remove any associations with strip clubs, sex work, or eroticism. Her response is simple: that pole dance isn’t necessarily a well-rounded workout because it lacks cardio, and that you do genuinely need to have skin showing to stick to the pole when performing certain tricks. Pole dance, according to Irlanda, is sexy just because it is, because it involves the movement of the human body. She views erotic movement as a chance to both celebrate and normalize human sexuality, cultivating a deeper acceptance and respect for humans as sexual creatures, and creating space for more nuanced conversations about misogyny, power, and consent. In the same way that Irlanda sees the potential benefits of codifying pole dance, she is interested in how society could create safer institutions for sexual exploration and expression: not to keep sex and sexuality separate from polite society, but to look closely at how power dynamics and misogyny shape how we interact with one another and create new ethical standards for sexuality.

Irlanda has her legs twisted around the pole and her hair flying. She is wearing a black bikini and white lace-up Pleaser heels, and the background is gold.

Photo courtesy the artist.

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Irlanda teaches weekly at Black Widow Pole Arts in Albuquerque, NM, and posts new choreography consistently as part of her Sunday Ofrenda practice on Instagram @labrujaenla.

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Expanding the Possibilities of Dance Journalism https://stanceondance.com/2023/10/16/expanding-the-possibilities-of-dance-journalism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=expanding-the-possibilities-of-dance-journalism Mon, 16 Oct 2023 18:05:48 +0000 http://stanceondance.com/?p=11425 Stance on Dance's fall/winter 2023 print publication is out! Learn more about how to receive your copy and support dance journalism!

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BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

I love interviewing dance artists. It allows me to speak with someone I normally wouldn’t and ask them directly about their inspirations, perspectives, and goals. I’ve been doing interviews for more than a decade, and I’ve come to love platforming artists.

When putting together this issue of Stance on Dance, I was tickled when several writers pitched interviews, profiles, and conversations with artists they admire. When I recruit contributors for each issue, I essentially give them carte blanche, asking them to write about their own work, a phenomenon in the field, or another artist they are interested in. While there is immense value in all the above, I like when contributors opt to cover other artists because it gives readers a glimpse into the minds of both the writer and their subject. It’s two for the price of one.

I’m also delighted about the various genres included in this issue: swing, body music, vogue, physical theater, flamenco, bharatanatyam, contemporary, belly dance, ballet, pole, and somatics. I’m proud to see Stance on Dance covering so many facets of the dance ecosystem.

This issue includes Bonnie Eissner’s interview with Caleb Teicher of Sw!ng Out, Ana Vrbaški’s essay on the New Balkan Rhythm Festival in Serbia, my interview with vogue and physical theater artist Willyum LaBeija, Shebana Coelho’s meditation on connecting dance with Urdu poetry, my interview with Leslie Streit and Robin McCain about the historical significance of the Harkness Ballet, Jill Randall’s conversation with Darrell Jones about endurance, longevity, and rest, Nikhita Winkler’s interview with tribal fusion dancer Alhazar, Julianna Massa’s profile of her pole dance teacher Irlanda, and my interview with fat somatic practitioner Jules Pashall. Magical realist illustrations are by Liz Brent-Maldonado.

As always, copies of Stance on Dance’s print publication are donated to college dance programs and other dance learning spaces around the US. To date, Stance on Dance has partnered with faculty at 25 programs to help ignite interest in the possibilities of dance journalism. And even though I’ve been running Stance on Dance for more than a decade, my own understanding of the possibilities of dance journalism is always being augmented too!

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To learn more or get your print copy, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Cover art by Liz Brent-Maldonado

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People https://stanceondance.com/people/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=people Thu, 09 Jan 2014 01:48:49 +0000 http://stanceondance.com/?page_id=2746 Have a question, opinion or a stance on dance? Get in touch at Emmaly@StanceOnDance.com. Meet our director and editor: Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist and arts journalist based in Albuquerque, NM. She founded Stance on Dance in 2012. Emmaly earned her MA in Arts Journalism from the University of…

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Have a question, opinion or a stance on dance? Get in touch at Emmaly@StanceOnDance.com.

Meet our director and editor:

Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist and arts journalist based in Albuquerque, NM. She founded Stance on Dance in 2012. Emmaly earned her MA in Arts Journalism from the University of Southern California and her BFA in Ballet and BS in Political Science from the University of Utah. She further trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and performed extensively around the Bay Area. Her first book, Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, was published in 2017, and her second book, Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance, was published in 2022. Emmaly is also a master DanceAbility instructor and facilitates movement groups at the UNM Hospital adult psychiatric ward, as well as is a founding member of the dance advocacy nonprofit ABQ Dance Connect. She continues to perform throughout the Southwest.

Emmaly Wiederholt staring upward with arms around face

Photo by Allen Winston

Our contributors have included:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, a performance artist and organizer in the Bay Area.

Gregory Bartning, a photographer in Portland, OR.

Liz Duran Boubion, the director of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in the Bay Area.

Liz Brent-Maldonado, an artist, writer, educator, and producer in San Francisco, CA.

Michelle Chaviano, a ballet dancer with Ballet North Texas.

Bradford Chin, a disabled dance artist and accessibility consultant in Chicago, IL, and San Francisco, CA.

Shebana Coelho, a writer and performer currently studying flamenco in Spain.

breana connor, an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator + healer in Albuquerque, NM.

Lauren Coons, an interdisciplinary artist, performer, healer and educator in Albuquerque, NM.

Julia Cost, a painter, textile designer, sewist, and dancer in Maui, HI.

Sophia Diehl, a dancer in New York City.

Bonnie Eissner, a writer in New York City.

Katie Flashner, a.k.a. The Girl with the Tree Tattoo, a World Champion ballroom dancer and author in ME.

Micaela Gardner, a dancer and choreographer in Baja, Mexico.

Sarah Groth, an interdisciplinary artist from Albuquerque, NM.

Cherie Hill, a dance educator and choreographer based in the Bay Area.

Lorie House, a dancer, choreographer, and lawyer in NM.

Silva Laukkanen, a dance educator and disability advocate in Austin, TX.

Mary Elizabeth Lenahan, the director of Dance Express in Fort Collins, CO.

Shannon Leypoldt, a dance artist, teacher, and sports massage therapist in Berlin.

Erin Malley, a dance artist and tango teacher based in West Michigan.

Julianna Massa, a dance artist in Albuquerque, NM.

Aiano Nakagawa, a dance artist, educator, facilitator, writer, and event producer in the Bay Area.

Jessie Nowak, a dance artist and filmmaker in Portland, OR.

Kevin O’Connor, a multidisciplinary artist in London, Ontario, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bhumi B Patel, an artist/activist based in the Bay Area.

Stephanie Potreck, a sports nutritionist and health advocate who currently resides in Germany.

Jill Randall, artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA.

Kathryn Roszak, a choreographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist in the Bay Area.

Donna Schoenherr, director of Ballet4Life and Move into Wellbeing in London, UK.

Maggie Stack, a dancer and teacher in Reno, NV.

Camille Taft, a CO front range-based mover and visual artist.

Mary Trunk, a filmmaker, choreographer, and multimedia artist in Altadena, CA.

Diana Turner-Forte, a teaching artist, healing arts coach, and writer in NC.

Ana Vrbaski, a body music practitioner in Serbia.

Nikhita Winkler, a dancer, choreographer, and teacher from Namibia who currently resides in Spain.

Erica Pisarchuk Wilson, a dance artist, visual artist and poet in Albuquerque, NM.

Rebecca Zeh, an interdisciplinary artist in Sarasota Springs, NY.

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Our board:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert

Cathy Intemann

Alana Isiguen

Courtney King

Malinda LaVelle

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