CULTURE | The pole dancing competition trend heats up.

Tonight Vaia Zaganas, 30, may become our first-ever North American pole dancing competition champ.

This is real. Zaganas is competing in the continent’s inaugural pole dancing championship at Vancouver’s Crush nightclub. She’ll be judged on technical difficulty, use of music, rhythm, showmanship and presentation, and she’ll keep her clothes on throughout.

The event’s already sold over 300 tickets, but it’s no strip show.

“There are amateur nights at strip clubs, but this is the first truly amateur pole dancing event that focuses on fitness and sport,” says Tracy Gray, co-founder of Aradia Fitness, one of the event’s sponsors.

Gray spearheaded the athletic pole dancing movement in Vancouver, teaching herself when she couldn’t find instruction elsewhere. “Getting started wasn’t easy,” she says. “I tried calling strip clubs, asking them if they’d put on a daytime class, and they’d be like ‘whatever!’ and hang up one me. Some of them said, ‘Okay, we’ll teach you to dance, but then you’ll have to work for us.’”

Not wanting to become a stripper, Gray ordered her own pole, installed it in her living room, and started going to clubs to pick up moves.

Now she’s teaching women as young as 19 and as old as 62 at classes that sell out on a regular basis.

“Pole dancing is challenging in that it is very physical. You are using your own body weight to support yourself, and it’s also very sexy. Everybody wants to be sexy at one time or another,” says Grey. Even so, she won’t be competing in the big show.

“Professional dancers and instructors can’t compete,” she laughs.

Zaganas, however, is one of Gray’s students. Their relationship feels like a classic trainer/athlete pairing. And that makes sense.

“I was already a professional athlete,” Zaganas says.

“I was a boxer in Las Vegas. I actually started out here, but I had to go to the States to have a real boxing career. So, I’ve been a professional boxer for five years now, but I’ve just moved back to Vancouver. I’m planning to teach some seminars at martial arts studios, that sort of thing. Before that, I was an amateur. I was on the Canadian team, and I was sponsored, so even then, I was training full time.”

To Zaganas, the move to pole dancing was a natural one. “I just thought it sounded really fun.”

Petite and pretty, Zaganas is likely not what you’d expect from either sport.

But she says the transition from scrapping to strip-dancing was fairly easy. “I can’t say I like it better than boxing, because they’re totally different,” she says.

To me, it feels like a huge, discordant shift, but even while agreeing with that sentiment, Zaganas remains blasé.

“Totally. It’s a shift. For one thing, it’s all women here, and I was dealing with all men before. I like it because it’s feminine and it’s creative and I’m learning so much. Every day I learn something new… Plus that was my job, and this is for fun, so it’s hard to compare.”

And in case you’re wondering, her family is fine with it.

“Nothing I do is odd to them. They’re used to me doing things that are kind of off the charts,” she says.

If she wins tonight, Zaganas will take home a pole of her own. It’s not a huge prize, but it will be the first in what Gray, for one, hopes will become a growing, annual competition.

2018: A note on headlines and helpful “editing”.

A version of this story published in Dose on June 28, 2005 under the obnoxious headline “‘Strippers’ feel the burn”, despite the fact that I say SPECIFICALLY IN THE PIECE that this competition includes no stripping. I tell you this because it’s such a good illustration of exactly how disgusting the people at Dose were. For the record, there is nothing wrong with stripping. It’s a job. A difficult, skilled job. These people weren’t strippers, however. Sigh. See clipping below.

More culture and trend pieces are here.

Published in Dose, June 28, 2005.