A signboard reading "Pole Dance Hot Girls, featuring Hsiao-Wei (小
Back on solid ground, the dancer moves suggestively through tables packed with wide-eyed male customers. Hsiao-wei pulls Shen Chin-feng (沈
"I just tucked a tip inside her tank top. I didn't know I'd have my pants taken down! But it was good for sure," Shen said excitedly after the show.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PLAYTV
"She's hot, not just hot, she's totally steaming!" said another customer and Taichung resident, Murry Cetin. His friend Andy Witt, a salsa dancer, was more discerning.
"We see a lot of this in London. Her swinging of her hair and her figure are nice. But her body movements still aren't very flexible."
Movement and flexibility aside, Hsiao-wei and her dancing partner certainly heated up the house.
Quite a scene
In Taichung, especially in the town's newly developed district of grand KTV parlors, love hotels and bars, pole dancing is not uncommon. A waiter at one establishment, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the trend began around five years ago. The dancers, who are nicknamed "pole dance la-mei" (鋼
And as the dance grew in popularity, some of the top dancers, like Hsiao-wei, began turning their 15-minute shows into more enduring fame. She even has an agent to help pave the way for her designs on show-business success. Last month, she appeared in Thailand, representing Taiwan in a friendly competition with top Thai pole dancer, Suganya. Now she is preparing to start a pole dance workshop for those who are interested in learning.
Hsiao-wei can be seen live in Taichung, but her show is also broadcast on the Web. Internet-based entertainment company PlayTV (聲活館) recruited her a year ago to be its "pole dance anchorwoman" for one of its shows. She talks about news, weather and a bit of celebrity gossip, but always with her legs and arms wrapped around a pole, wearing her trademark brand-name tank top, miniskirt and leather boots. She has become arguably the most popular figure on Taiwan-based Internet entertainment shows.
About a year before Hsiao-wei's show, there was a popular Web-cast show featuring so-called "underwear anchorwomen," who, as you might guess, reported the news in ther skivvies with suggestive voices and gestures. It was the first locally produced exotic show on the Internet, appearring on the now defunct Banana Web site.
"Our show is not about eroticism, as was the Banana site. We just wanted to create a different entertainment program on the Internet," said Rita Wu (吳
Another show, called "Hsiao-wei competing with Thai pole dancers" on hiChannel, one of Chunghwa telecom's Hinet Web sites, claims some 110,000 hits. Her other shows all have around 70,000. These are considered the highest hit rates among self-produced Web-cast entertainment shows on Hinet, Seednet, Yahoo and Yam.
Hsiao-wei also talks on-line to her Internet fans on hiChannel message boards, answering letters from admirers who claim to be her biggest fan or ideal suitor. There are, of course, obscene posts as well.
Rising star
Having long legs and a face that her fans say resembles pop singer Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒) or actress Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) helps stir starlet potential for Hsiao-wei.
Hsiao-wei will also be the first to tell you that with her face and body, she stands a good chance of attaining stardom among Taiwan's fewer than 10 regular pole-dance performers.
"But the biggest difference between me and them is the way I dance," she says proudly, then demonstrates what she's talking about. Jumping up the pole, she flips her body upside down, holding on with her legs -- a pose she says she can hold for quite a while. Then, still hanging upside down on the pole, she grabs the bar with her hands and does the splits. "Very few people can do this," she said. For the finale, she climbs to the top of the pole and twirls her way down.
"The other dancers just dance around the pole in some arousing way, but I take this dance seriously," Hsiao-wei said, showing the bruises that cover her knees and legs. They're the price she's paid during her year-and-a-half-long pole dance career.
Hsaio-wei said she began clamboring around on poles out of curiosity. She was once the lead singer of a pop rock band that performed at a Taichung pub called Rock. After watching a few pole dance shows there, she began practicing at her own house. "I asked my plumber friend to set up a pole at my house and he gave me a bargain," she said.
Not necessarily sexy
Having risen to the top of a form of entertainment most popular among men, how does this sexy performer see herself? "I don't want people to see my dancing as sexual. It doesn't have to be," she said. "Fashion models also show their underwear quite often on stage," she said, adding that her "family are all very supportive" of her.
Pole dancing in Taiwan is hardly a way to make a living, as evidenced in the salary of the dancers. A star dancer like Hsiao-wei receives less than NT$2,000 for each show, dancing an average of three shows a night, three nights a week -- not nearly enough for such an ambitious young girl.
"We have a multi-part plan for her career, that includes acting and voice training," said her agent Rita Wu. "There are already movie directors from Hong Kong and Japan expressing interest in her."
Hsiao-wei's own most recent plan is to organize a "pole dance summer camp"(鋼
According to Wu, dozens of people have signed up for the class already. "Most of them are girls," she said.
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