Pole dancing - take some lessons

When Camille Meyer began holding private pole-dancing lessons four years ago, her clients were professional lap dancers eager to improve their technique. Today her pupils are actresses, models (including one very famous British supermodel), TV presenters (she was responsible for Kelly Brook's seductive strip in the play Eye Contact) and housewives. They pole-dance, she says, for their own pleasure (and presumably their husbands/boyfriends) and to keep fit.

A one-to-one lesson with Meyer costs £50 an hour, but next month she is starting classes at the glamorous Third Space gym in Soho. Camilla's "Stripworks", says the gym's fitness director Chris St George, is a different type of dance-fitness class. As yet there are no poles, but if the class becomes popular, says St George, they will be installed. Swinging around a pole certainly sounds a lot more exciting than sweating on the treadmill.

I arrange to meet Camille at For Your Eyes Only in Mayfair. It opened in May and both men and women are frequent visitors. Camille has taught many of the girls working here. I imagined Camille to be a busty blonde past her table sell-by date. Instead, she's a lithe, whippet-thin 29-year-old with small breasts and waist-length dark hair. As a child she had been a gymnast and ballerina, and she left her boarding school in Sussex at 16 to train at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts.

After graduating, she spent several years working as a dancer in TV shows and occasionally choreographing stage performances for pop bands. She admits to a long-standing fascination with the world of stripping and in 1998, low on funds, she decided to satisfy her curiosity. She got a job as a pole and table dancer at the Astral and within a year was the club's manager.

Camille soon noticed that the girls had little concept of slow seduction. "They would awkwardly whip off their spangly costumes in a matter of seconds," she recalls, reminding me that the 1940s American stripper, Dixie Evans, was famous for taking five minutes just to remove one glove. "Girls rarely went topless then," she continues in her soft husky voice. "It was all about the art of seduction. Even at clubs like the Moulin Rouge where there was nudity, the dancing was revered as an art form."

At the Astral she banned tacky perspex high heels and sequined, flimsy outfits, instead encouraging black stilettos, evening dresses and expensive underwear. She found that customers paid more for girls who were good dancers than for those with big breasts. Soon after she stopped hiring girls with implants.

More female customers started appearing at the club. In 1999, the designer J Maskrey asked Camille to help choreograph a fashion show for her Skin Jewellery at the Astral using pole dancers, including Camille. The show was a huge success, Camille's reputation spread, and private clients started requesting lessons.

Despite fashion's current obsession with all things erotic, when the lights dim, it remains hard to defend pole dancing as anything more than the fulfilment of male fantasy through bare flesh and strategically placed G-strings. Camille says she wants this to change, for clubs to return to the golden days of the Moulin Rouge, where cabaret and dramatic costumes were more important than freak-sized breasts, collagen-stuffed lips and peroxide blonde hair. She is planning to start her own club at the end of this year with a Geisha Girl theme. I ask Camille if she felt uncomfortable when she first removed her top at the Astral under the leering gaze of drunk customers. She replies that she felt nothing. "Girls are not embarrassed to show their breasts to men," she adds, "after all, we do it on the beach every summer. They are self-conscious about their dancing technique, not their nudity."

She refuses to teach any girls if they are under 20. Many, she claims, are training to be nurses, lawyers, designers. She encourages them to stop after two years, "otherwise you get blinded by the money". As for the fitness side, I tried a few simple moves and was soon hooked. Shimmying up and down is easier than you think, and Camille says her customers have noticed "increased muscle definition within two or three weeks, especially on the arms, butt and thighs". Added bonuses are poise, balance and rhythm.

Who knows, the pole could soon become a popular "design feature". One of Camille's customers, a well-known actress, is currently installing one in her front room.

For enquiries about pole-dancing lessons with Camille Meyer, call Third Space on 020 7439 6333.

emily sheffield