Journal du Pôle

Set to the lilting tones of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s honeyed rasp, Bloom is a queer African pole dancer’s surreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, inspired by Ballet Black’s production A Dream Within a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Filmed against a scene of glossy anthuriums and fluorescent birds of paradise, a vibrant bouquet dissolves, revealing a portrait of an African body wreathed on a steel pole, in various states of limbo: an analogy for queerness itself. In a state of nature, pole dance – like queerness – is innocent. However, stigma attaches a perceived and misconceived immorality. Through a system of prisms and mirrors, attention is first drawn to an anthurium’s spike-shaped inflorescence, which bears small flowers with perfect male and female parts. Focus then shifts to a pole in perspective, superimposed against the lingering red silhouette of an anthurium’s queer premise, the desire to be.

Set to the lilting tones of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s honeyed rasp, Bloom is a queer African pole dancer’s surreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, inspired by Ballet Black’s production A Dream Within a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Filmed against a scene of glossy anthuriums and fluorescent birds of paradise, a vibrant bouquet dissolves, revealing a portrait of an African body wreathed on a steel pole, in various states of limbo: an analogy for queerness itself. In a state of nature, pole dance – like queerness – is innocent. However, stigma attaches a perceived and misconceived immorality. Through a system of prisms and mirrors, attention is first drawn to an anthurium’s spike-shaped inflorescence, which bears small flowers with perfect male and female parts. Focus then shifts to a pole in perspective, superimposed against the lingering red silhouette of an anthurium’s queer premise, the desire to be.