Five years ago, Leila Davis (@cutiewhippingham) founded Blackstage, a non-profit events company centring and enhancing the creativity of pole dancers of colour, with a special focus on Queer, Trans, Disabled, low-income or sex working performers. The rest, as they say,…
In the past three years, my periods have been off-the-charts painful. I’m talking “screaming in pain,” “feeling like I’m being stabbed as blood flows like in The Shining lift scene” painful, to the point where my periods were affecting my…
As a Very Online Millennial, 2024 was less than ideal for my mental health. Since we’ve entered the 2020s, I’ve kept feeling stuck in the ‘Can we go back to precedented times?’ meme. So I’m starting 2025 the only way…
In October I was a guest speaker and performer at Exotic Hell, Elvira Langdon’s brand-new pole dance competition which promised to be the first openly transfeminist pole competition in Italy, platforming and centring sex workers and the erotic. In case…
“Get you a girl who can do both – pole dance and academia” (and who gets, like, really anxious about it). “Doing both” was, for a while, my brand, something I lived and breathed, without too much thought. But as…
Dr Zahra Stardust is my academic idol and an all-around legend: a socio-legal scholar working at the intersections of sexuality, technology, law and social justice, Zahra is also a stripper from the early days of Australian pole, a former pole…
Following recent safety concerns at competitions, mentions of a governing body for the pole dance industry have been floating around again. My name has been made a few times as someone who may be interested in taking part in it,…
I’ve decided to take a break from competing in pole dance competitions, meaning that PDSM, which you may have read about here, will be my last comp for a while. In this blog post, I explain why I wasn’t enjoying…
In the past year, I have been upping my pole dance video game by booking professional showreels with film-maker, pole dancer and university lecturer Zeta Spyraki. We love a versatile babe! Zeta has the power to make me look like…
After the Blackstage Talks: Breaking Moulds panel I was honoured to have chaired, I have been sitting on a lot of thoughts following the incredibly generative conversations we had with pioneers in our industry. As a result, this blog post…
