WorldPride: Club Chrome's Intimate Pole Performance Explores Queer Identity

This week, Club Chrome, Australia’s first queer pole dance collective created to specifically platform people of colour (POC) and sex worker artists, is presenting Fxckery – their first ever full length, fully choreographed group show.

Club Chrome – which has an ethos in platforming, supporting, and developing stigmatised minority artists within the LGBTQIA+ community – made its international debut last year with sold out showcases in London and Singapore, the latter of which led the Sydney-based collective to form a Singaporean chapter.

As the members of the group told VICE, the need for a pole dance collective that prioritised queer people of colour and queer sex workers was clear.

“Pole dancing grew from the labour of POC strippers, and yet the image of pole dance – often rebranded as ‘pole fitness’ – is whitewashed and removed from its sex worker roots,” said the group.

“The same whitewashing and sex worker erasure is also seen in queer spaces. Additionally, the nature of sex work exaggerates the structural privileges inherent in our society, privileging white, thin, cis-passing bodies above all else. We seek to upend these dynamics by platforming POC, visibly queer, and sex worker artists that are usually erased from images of pole dance in studios and in clubs.”

Across three nights, from Thursday March 2 until Saturday March 4, the show will take place at Erskineville’s PACT Centre for Emerging Artists. 

Fxckery is unlike any other performance by Club Chrome, who have graced the stage across Sydney’s premier arts and events spaces, including Soft Centre, Vivid Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Queer Art After Hours, House of Mince, Heaps Gay, Sydney Solstice and DEiFY, among others.

“Unlike previous shows we’ve done, where individual dancers come up one after the other to perform, this show has given us the opportunity to experiment and push our art further than we ever have before,” they said.

Over the course of the one-hour show, Club Chrome’s eight dancers – cilla, Eva Berlin, Linhqu, Mutant Dysphoria, Oryx, Sela Vai, Salem Serene and Thurman – will perform onstage across three poles. Each dancer, with their own lived experience at the intersection of queerness, sex work and BIPOC identity, exploring sexuality, gender, the gendered expectations of pole dance, art and community.

The choreography and design of the show has been collaboratively produced by the dancers over five months, who were guided by choreographers Oryx and Sela Vai to question and explore their “genders, sexualities, experiences of desire” and the ways that the dancers move and communicate in their worlds.

“By centering our queer, POC, and sex worker bodies as vessels of our lived experiences, Fxckery has become a joyous celebration of queer sensuality and a call to claim the right to self-representation both individually and collaboratively,” they said. 

“We invite you into this intimate space where we explore what it means to be human, to be sexual and to be queer.” 

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