The History of Pole Dancing: Where It All Began

Ask ten pole dancers where pole dancing came from and you’ll get at least three answers. Some will tell you it’s 800 years old and started in India. Some will say China. Others will tell you, quite firmly, that it came from strip clubs and everything else is wishful thinking. The truth is messier and a lot more interesting than any of those on its own.

For this update I went back to the sources: academic papers, museum records, old newspapers, federation archives and the work of the stripper historians who have done so much to set the record straight. This is the result. Where the evidence is solid, I say so. Where a story gets repeated everywhere but nobody can actually prove it, I say that too.

Where did pole dancing originate? The short answer

Modern pole dancing, the spins, climbs, inversions and floorwork taught in studios all over the world, was developed by dancers in strip clubs, mostly in North America, in the late 20th century. It moved into fitness studios in the 1990s and 2000s and became a competitive sport after that.

People have been doing acrobatics on poles for much, much longer. China has records of pole climbing from more than 2,000 years ago, and India’s mallakhamb, a pole sport for wrestlers, has roots in the 12th century. Those traditions are real and they’re impressive. But nobody has found a historical line running from them to the pole in your living room. They’re cousins, not grandparents.

Pole dancing history timeline

• Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220): Pole climbing is part of China’s acrobatic entertainments, recorded in texts and tomb art.
• 12th century: The Sanskrit Mānasollāsa describes Indian wrestlers training on an oiled wooden pole, the forerunner of mallakhamb.
• 1300s: A Welsh poet writes about a birch tree turned into a maypole in Llanidloes, one of the earliest maypole records in Britain.
• 1620s: Thomas Morton puts up an 80-foot maypole at Merrymount, Massachusetts, and scandalizes his Puritan neighbors.
• 1644: Parliament orders every maypole in England and Wales taken down.
• 1836: The ribbon maypole dance appears on the London stage.
• 1893: The “danse du ventre” causes a sensation at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. “Hoochie coochie” shows spread to fairs and carnivals.
• 1920s to 1930s: Striptease becomes central to burlesque, and girl shows tour with traveling carnivals.
• 1980s: Dancers in Canadian and US strip clubs turn the pole into an athletic apparatus with climbs, spins and inversions.
• 1994: Fawnia Mondey starts teaching pole to non-performers. Her first pole video, Pole Work, follows in 1998.
• Early 2000s: Sheila Kelley opens S Factor, pole goes on Oprah (2003) and dedicated pole studios open in Australia, Canada, the US and the UK.
• 2005: Jamilla Deville wins the first Miss Pole Dance Australia.
• 2009: The International Pole Sports Federation (IPSF) is founded, and the first US Pole Dance Championship is held in New York.
• 2012: The first World Pole Sports Championships.
• 2015 to 2016: #NotAStripper trends on Instagram, and strippers answer with #YesAStripper.
• 2017: The IPSF gets observer status from GAISF, an umbrella body for sports federations. Its rival, IPSAF, renames itself POSA.
• 2019: Instagram hides pole hashtags, then apologizes.
• 2021: Netflix releases Strip Down, Rise Up.
• 2023: GAISF is wound up, and pole’s observer status goes with it.
• 2026: More than 650 athletes compete at the IPSF’s World Pole & Aerial Championships in Prague.

Chinese pole: pole climbing in ancient China

If you want the oldest pole skills on record, look to China, not India. Acrobatics took shape as a performing art there in the early Han dynasty. Han texts and pictures record pole climbing, tightrope walking and even performers working on poles mounted on moving carts. One Han tomb painting from Shandong shows ten acrobats on a single long pole held up by one man.¹

These acts were part of what was later called the “Show of One Hundred Skills,” a mixed program of acrobatics, balancing and spectacle. Circus historian Dominique Jando notes that pole climbing, the act we now call Chinese pole, was already an old favorite that writers were describing around a thousand years ago, and that European troupes touring China in the 19th century brought Chinese specialties like pole balancing back to Western circuses.²

Modern Chinese pole looks quite different from the pole in your studio. Australia’s National Institute of Circus Arts describes the apparatus as vertical steel poles, generally about 10 to 30 feet tall and 3 to 4 inches across. Performers climb, slide down, hold poses and leap from one pole to another.³ Compare that with the 45mm (about 1.75-inch) pole most of us train on, which comes in its own range of materials and finishes.

Chinese pole was traditionally performed by men, and performers wore clothes to protect their skin from friction. That’s the opposite of pole dance, where bare skin is what keeps you on the pole. Today both men and women perform it.⁴ Here’s a Chinese pole act from the UK’s National Centre for Circus Arts:

Mallakhamb: India’s wrestler’s pole (12th century onward)

Mallakhamb is the one most pole histories start with, and it deserves its place. The name means “wrestler’s pole,” and it’s now often marketed as “pole yoga.” Researcher Patrick McCartney has traced it back to a 12th-century Sanskrit encyclopedia, the Mānasollāsa, written for the Chalukya king Someshvara III. In its section on wrestling, three verses describe a pole fixed firmly in the ground and smeared with oil. The wrestler grips it with his thighs, arms and chest and climbs it while turning, building strength as he goes.⁵

That’s where the “800-year-old pole dancing” claim comes from. Two catches, though. McCartney points out that the text calls it “pole exercise,” never mallakhamb, and that it’s unclear how and when that exercise turned into the sport we know today. The popular date of 1135 also comes from secondary sources rather than the text itself. Researcher Jon Burtt agrees on the basic purpose: mallakhamb began as a way to build strength, agility and flexibility for wrestling.⁶

Tradition credits a wrestler called Balambhat Dada Deodhar with reviving mallakhamb around 1800 at the court of Bajirao II, the last Peshwa. McCartney found that story much harder to pin down than the legends suggest, and mallakhamb already appears in the training of earlier Peshwas. Today there are three competitive forms: a fixed wooden pole, a hanging pole that swings as you work and a rope. A traditional pole is teak or rosewood, oiled with castor oil and much thicker at the base than at the top.⁷

Mallakhamb is very much alive. Madhya Pradesh made it the official state sport in April 2013,⁸ and the first World Mallakhamb Championship was held at Shivaji Park in Mumbai in February 2019, with athletes from 15 countries.⁹ It’s long been seen as a man’s sport, but that’s changing: in 2021 Himani Parab received India’s Arjuna Award, one of the country’s top sporting honors, for mallakhamb.¹⁰

You’ll also read that mallakhamb was an Olympic demonstration sport in 1936. It wasn’t. A physical culture club from Amravati took a team to Berlin during those Games and put on a display of mallakhamb and yoga, and the club says it still keeps the medal it won for that display. That’s a great story, but it isn’t the same as being part of the Olympics.¹¹

This mallakhamb display gives you a feel for how fast and acrobatic it is:

Maypole dancing: a very different kind of pole

Maypoles turn up in a lot of pole dancing histories, mostly because they have “pole” in the name. They’re a lovely tradition, but they have nothing to do with climbing or spinning.

Historian Ronald Hutton describes the maypole as the most elaborate of the spring greenery customs found across farming Europe: a tall wooden pole planted in the ground and dressed with flowers and leaves, sometimes with streamers, a flag or a garland on top. People danced around it, often in rings of men and women going in opposite directions. Hutton also points out that the idea of the maypole as a phallic symbol came from its 17th-century Puritan critics, not from the people dancing around it.¹²

One of the earliest maypoles on record in Britain stood in Llanidloes, mid Wales. The 14th-century poet Gruffudd ab Adda wrote a poem to a birch tree that had been cut down and made into the town’s maypole.¹³ Three centuries later, in the middle of the Civil War, Parliament ordered every maypole in England and Wales taken down, calling them “a Heathenish vanity.”¹⁴ They went back up after the Restoration in 1660.

Americans have their own maypole scandal. On May Day in the late 1620s (traditionally 1627), the English lawyer Thomas Morton and his men raised an 80-foot pine as a maypole, with a pair of buck’s horns nailed near the top, at their settlement, which they renamed Ma-re Mount.¹⁵ The Plymouth colony was horrified. Myles Standish arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and John Endecott later had the maypole cut down.¹⁶

What about the ribbons? The ribbon-plaiting dance most people picture when they hear “maypole” is surprisingly young. Hutton traces it to a Sicilian custom that reached England through a London stage play in 1836. It spread to schools after Whitelands College, a teacher training college, adopted it for its May Day celebrations in 1881.¹⁷ So if anyone tells you pole dancers are carrying on an ancient fertility rite, you can politely tell them the ribbons are Victorian.

Hoochie coochie: fairs, carnivals and burlesque (1890s to 1930s)

Now we get closer to home. The story of how sexy dance became big business in America starts at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was the first world’s fair to put its amusements in a separate area, the Midway Plaisance, and more than 27 million people went. One of the Midway’s most popular attractions was “A Street in Cairo,” where dancers performed a dance that went by names like the danse du ventre, the muscle dance and the hoochie coochie. Today we’d call it belly dance.

It caused a scandal. The anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock wanted it shut down, and the fair’s Board of Lady Managers asked for an investigation. Dance scholar Donna Carlton later identified the Cairo dancers as ghawazi, traveling dancers from Egypt, and one review from 1893 names a dancer called Fatima. What nobody has found is any record of a dancer called “Little Egypt” performing at the fair, although plenty of dancers used the name afterward.¹⁸ By the late 1890s “Little Egypt” was a stage name used by several women, including dancers at the Streets of Cairo sideshow on Coney Island.¹⁹

The dance spread fast. In 1894 a county fair in Somerset County, New Jersey, advertised a “Couchee-Couchee Dance” for men only.²⁰ Around the turn of the century, the “cooch” craze pushed burlesque toward spicier acts, and by the 1920s and 1930s striptease was at its center. Thousands of dancers worked the traveling carnivals, circuses and small clubs.²¹ Even the big names did it: the Burlesque Hall of Fame notes that stars like Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee could earn as much as $10,000 a week working a circus.²²

When did pole dancing become sexualized? Into the strip clubs

This is one of the most searched questions about pole history, and it’s built on a slightly wrong assumption. It suggests pole dancing started out innocent and was later “sexualized.” For the style of pole most of us dance, it was the other way around. The pole as we know it grew up in strip clubs, as part of a sexy, theatrical dance, and the fitness world borrowed it from there.

Researchers are pretty clear on this. A 2009 study in Feminism & Psychology describes pole dancing as having recently made the jump from an act performed only in strip clubs to something marketed as aerobic exercise.²³ Cultural researcher Joshua Paul Dale, writing in 2013, put pole dance’s beginnings in exotic dance clubs “over two decades ago.”²⁴

Exactly when the first pole went up in a club is harder to say. You’ll see a story online about a dancer called Belle Jangles performing the “first recorded” pole dance at an Oregon club called Mugwumps in 1968. I couldn’t find any record behind it. The earliest version I found is an uncited blog post from 2015. Until someone turns up a photo or a newspaper clipping, it’s a legend.

The better-documented story is the 1980s, and it belongs to strippers. Stripper historians Crimson Misty and AM Davies point to Vancouver, where relaxed liquor laws in the 1980s made it a haven for strip clubs and clubs hired top dancers to train others.²⁵ Research by AM Davies and United Pole Artists identifies a space built in 1984 for a Vancouver club’s dancers to work on their pole and floorwork as the first recorded pole “studio,” and says UPA records show a pole competition held by and for strippers that same year. The same research credits Atlanta strippers, especially at Magic City, with tricks that shaped today’s advanced pole, and names two Black strippers, Spyda and Magic, as the creators of some of the first documented doubles tricks.²⁶

That’s the part of pole history that often gets skipped. The climbs, spins, inversions, floorwork and heel clacks that studios now teach were worked out by women dancing for a living. A 2023 study based on interviews with strippers describes their pole work as skilled and often voluntary physical labor, and found that some dancers built their pole skills for enjoyment and meaning as well as money.²⁷ If you love exotic pole or dancing in heels, this is your lineage. It’s also why club poles behave the way they do: if you’ve ever wondered, here’s whether stripper poles spin.

Pole Parlour’s video on the real history of contemporary pole is a good watch if you want more on this:

The first pole fitness classes and videos (1990s to 2000s)

Pole fitness started the way a lot of good things do: with dancers teaching their friends. Fawnia Mondey, one of the first well-known strippers to teach pole in Canadian clubs, is usually named as the pioneer. Her studio says she began teaching in 1994 and ran the first class teaching pole to non-performers that year.²⁸ In her own telling, her first instructional tape, Pole Work, came out on VHS in the summer of 1998.²⁹ She later moved to Las Vegas, where her Pole Fitness Studio still runs.

In the US, the big push came from Hollywood. Actor Sheila Kelley played a stripper in the 2000 film Dancing at the Blue Iguana, and after that role she opened her first S Factor studio, around 2001. By 2006 she had seven locations from Los Angeles to New York.³⁰ Kelley went on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2003, and within a few years pole and “cardio strip” classes that had started on the coasts were turning up in the Midwest.³¹

The mid-2000s were peak striptease workout. Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease DVD was the top-selling fitness title in the country according to Billboard, and gyms like Crunch were offering stripper workouts. Dance poles were showing up in people’s homes, too.³² The company behind X-Pole was incorporated in London in 2004,³³ and home dance poles have been part of pole culture ever since.

Australia had its own boom. Bobbi’s Pole Studio in Sydney is often described as the country’s first, and research from the University of Western Australia counted just 4 pole studios in Australia in 2004 and 118 by 2018.³⁴ Miss Pole Dance Australia launched in 2005, and its first winner was Jamilla Deville, whose Art of Pole DVDs taught a generation of home polers.

Academics noticed the boom too. Samantha Holland’s 2010 book Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment took an in-depth look at pole classes in several countries and the women who take them.³⁵ A 2011 study of 15 Australian studio websites found that studios leaned on pole’s sexy reputation while also selling it as a fun, slightly tongue-in-cheek upper-body workout.³⁶ Sociologist Dana Fennell later described pole studios as spaces sitting between adult entertainment, fitness, art and sport, which anyone who has done a heels class straight after a conditioning class will recognize.³⁷

From studio to sport: pole competitions and federations

Strippers were holding pole contests long before anyone talked about pole as a sport, but the late 2000s brought competitions aimed at studio dancers. The first US Pole Dance Championship was held in New York in March 2009. Twelve dancers were picked from more than 50 applicants, one was injured, and Jenyne Butterfly took the title.³⁸

Much of the push to make pole an official sport came from Katie (KT) Coates in the UK. She ran a survey in 2006 in which more than 10,000 people voted for pole to become an Olympic sport. In 2008 she and Tim Trautman started work on a federation and came up with the term “pole sports,” and the International Pole Sports Federation (IPSF) was founded in 2009. It wrote pole’s first code of points in 2011 and held the first World Pole Sports Championships in 2012, with 43 athletes from 14 countries. By 2017 that had grown to 229 athletes from 36 countries, and Para Pole had been added.³⁹

October 2017 was the big headline moment. The Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) gave the IPSF “observer status,” and stories about pole heading to the Olympics went around the world. The BBC’s coverage was more careful, pointing out that an Olympic hopeful needed 50 national federations when pole had around 20, and that there was still “a long, long way to go.”⁴⁰ That was the high point. GAISF’s members voted to dissolve it in 2022, and its final liquidation was approved in September 2023,⁴¹ which meant the observer status went with it. As of 2026 no pole federation is recognized by the International Olympic Committee. We go through the whole story in is pole dancing an Olympic sport?

Pole sport has never spoken with one voice, either. In June 2017 the International Pole Sports and Art Federation (IPSAF) renamed itself the Pole Sports & Arts World Federation (POSA), and it runs its own world championships separately from the IPSF.⁴² Alongside the federations there are countless independent and artistic competitions. Our list of pole dance competitions and how to enter is a good place to start if you’re tempted.

Here’s what a modern competition routine looks like, from a 2022 Pole Sport Organization champion:

Whether pole is “really” a sport, an art or both is its own argument, and we’ve had a go at it in is pole dancing a sport or an artform?

#NotAStripper and pole’s stripper roots

As pole moved into gyms, a lot of new students felt they had to explain themselves to family, coworkers and anyone else who smirked. On Instagram, around 2015, that turned into the hashtag #notastripper. Strippers, understandably, didn’t love being the thing everyone was distancing themselves from. Writer and former stripper Elle Stanger answered with #yesastripper, and USC lecturer Heather Berg described pole as an art form that sex workers developed.⁴³

This site has always been on the strippers’ side of this one. The short version: you don’t have to be a stripper, or want to be one, to love pole. You also don’t need to put anyone down to explain why you do it. And when a move came from the club, which most of the good ones did, say so.

Mallakhamb and Chinese pole are worth celebrating. They just aren’t a reason to erase the women who built the dance you learn in class.

The full story of the hashtag war is in #NotAStripper vs. #YesAStripper. If you want to dig further, read are pole fitness and stripping all that different? and a woman’s right to pole dance.

Men in pole

Here’s a fun irony. The oldest pole traditions, Chinese pole and mallakhamb, were mostly men’s business. Modern pole flipped that completely, and men have spent the last 20 years slowly finding their way back in.

Men have competed at the World Pole Sports Championships since the very first one. Only five men took part in 2012, but by 2017 there were 40. In 2016, the male finalists at the World Pole Sport Championships in London told VICE that people were starting to see men’s pole as normal and sporty rather than strange, and one called it a sport “for power men.”⁴⁴ Age isn’t a barrier either. Former weightlifter Paul Bradley took up pole sport after shoulder rehab and became the men’s over-60s world champion in 2022.⁴⁵

It still isn’t always easy. A 2023 study of men who pole dance in the US found they often pick and choose who they tell, because of pole’s links with women, gay men and sex work, and that some worry about how they come across in studios full of women.⁴⁶ In Australia, the national championships had four men come through the state heats in 2023, up from only a couple the year before.⁴⁷ Small numbers, but they’re growing. If you’re a guy thinking about it, our tips for male pole dancers are for you.

Pole dancing today

Pole now lives in several worlds at once: strip clubs, fitness studios, home living rooms, theaters, circus schools and international sports halls. That’s its strength, and occasionally its headache.

Social media has been both. Instagram helped pole explode, then in July 2019 pole hashtags like #poledancing suddenly stopped showing posts. A petition drew more than 17,000 signatures, and on July 31, 2019 Instagram apologized and said the hashtags had been blocked by mistake.⁴⁸ The researcher and pole dancer Carolina Are has since written about the way pole content keeps getting caught in Instagram’s moderation.⁴⁹ We cover that summer in the summer Instagram hid pole dancing.

Pole got its own Netflix documentary in February 2021. Strip Down, Rise Up, directed by Michèle Ohayon, follows women using pole to work through trauma and shame.⁵⁰ Strippers criticized it for leaving them out of the story (we cover the row in our #NotAStripper deep dive), which tells you how far that argument still had to run.

The sport side keeps growing too. The IPSF now calls itself the International Pole and Aerial Sports Federation, and more than 650 athletes competed at its World Pole & Aerial Championships in Prague in late 2026, across pole, aerial pole, aerial hoop and aerial silks.⁵¹ If aerial is calling you, here are some unique aerial sports to try.

Meanwhile, the classes that tie it all together are more varied than ever. Plenty of studios now teach exotic, heels and floorwork classes alongside tricks and flexibility, and pole has plenty of famous fans too (here are the celebrities who pole dance). Tricks that were “advanced” ten years ago are taught in intermediate classes now. If the move names baffle you, our pole move glossary will help. If this has made you want to try it, start with pole dancing for beginners.

Pole dancing history FAQs

Who invented pole dancing?

No single person did. The modern style was developed by strippers in North American clubs, especially from the 1980s on. Fawnia Mondey is often credited with the first classes for non-dancers (1994) and one of the first instructional videos (1998), and Sheila Kelley’s S Factor helped bring pole into mainstream fitness in the early 2000s.

When was the stripper pole invented?

Nobody knows for sure. The often-quoted date of 1968 in Oregon has no evidence behind it that I could find. What is documented is that by the 1980s, dancers in Canadian and US clubs were using poles for climbs, spins and inversions, and clubs were training dancers to use them.

Did pole dancing originate from stripping?

The pole dancing taught in studios today did. Older pole disciplines like Chinese pole and mallakhamb exist and share some skills, but there’s no documented line from them to modern pole.

What was pole dancing invented for?

Depends which pole you mean. Mallakhamb was strength training for wrestlers. Chinese pole was acrobatic entertainment. Modern pole dancing was developed as performance in strip clubs, then adapted for fitness, art and sport.

How old is pole dancing?

Pole acrobatics go back more than 2,000 years in China, and mallakhamb’s roots go back to the 12th century in India. Pole dancing as a dance and fitness form is much younger: decades, not centuries.

Is pole dancing an Olympic sport?

No. Pole has never been on the Olympic program and no pole federation is recognized by the IOC. The 2017 observer status came from GAISF, not the IOC, and ended when GAISF closed.

Further reading

If you enjoyed this, you might like these too:

• 17 Incredible Facts About Pole Dancing
• Remembering Jamilla Deville
• The Best Pole Dancing Books
• What Does Pole Dancing Do To Your Body?
• 12 Amazing Health Benefits of Pole Dancing
• Learn Pole Dancing at Home
• 6 Ways to Get Involved in Our Pole Dance Community

Happy poling!

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