SINGAPORE — Pole dancing at da:ns Fest. Now that’s a first.

From seedy strip clubs and swanky dance clubs to dance studios for health enthusiasts, it’s now claimed new territory inside the black box — a steel pole planted in the centre, its flag the dancer wrapped around it.

Axis, phallus, totem pole — whatever metaphor you wish to inscribe upon it, it’s presence is undeniable and in ALPHA, a new work from Daniel Kok, Eisa Jocson and Arco Renz, the body is not just simply a body but one that is almost always in relation to it. It orbits this vertical piece of metal and is defined by it.

Under the dizzying, whirling LED lights of Takayuki Fujimoto, the body is in a state of transformation. If Swan Lake had its role-changes, here it’s more of a blurring. Jocson, an “interventionist pole dancer” from the Philippines (as dramaturg/producer Tang Fu Kuen described her), and Singaporean Kok, a contemporary dance artist who picked up pole dancing, take turns onstage, around and on the pole.

And the confusion starts at the get go, with its jumble of sexual and formal codes. The space awash in the red light of bars and with her face betraying no emotion, Jocson looks sporty and oozes sensuality, slowly building up with sexually suggestive poses — but she also flexes her muscles like a bodybuilder.

I find the ambiguity interesting. Here’s an attractive woman flaunting herself and performing not like a female stripper or club dancer but like Manila’s “macho dancers” or Bangkok’s “go go boys”. Her feminine physique — later underscored as she goes unapologetically topless and challenges the politics of your gaze — belies the masculine sensibility she presents.

A swift blackout and you’ve got Kok (wearing a cap that’s like half a disco ball so maybe it’s diskoballdanny?), who climbs up the pole, suspended in a foetal position. It’s his turn to perform, his turn to flex his biceps like Jocson, but this time, of course, he’s a man. Straining, the effort, the manliness, is emphasised.

Much later and you’ve got the two of them taking turns on the pole, alternately showing their skills, as Fujimoto joins in the fun, his precise manipulation of the lights swiftly circling the space to create shadows. In this dizzying strobe-effect, the dancers’ bodies, too, become poles around which their shadows revolve.

There are some strong moments in ALPHA but as in all new work (and this is apparently super fresh), it does feel loose and needs to tighten up. Not sure what its very last segment, with Kok and Jocson on the floor in the dim light, was all about, and the piece works best when it zeroes in clearly on, like I said, the body in relation to the pole and its politics.

Pole dancing is a new thing for me, especially in this performance context. I’m not really familiar with its dance vocabulary but what I found interesting is how it highlights strength and endurance as an integral part of dance and how this is emphasised most by stationary shapes and lines and not by movement. Or how the most employed part of the body in all other dance forms, the sole of your feet, is rather useless in this mostly vertical form. I’m now pretty intrigued by it and I hope this isn’t a kind of one-off token show in an an arts event like da:ns Fest. I’m guessing it’s a pretty selfish dance form in that, at the end of it, it’s really about that piece of metal jutting out, but who knows?

ALPHA runs until Oct 11 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Tickets for the remaining 2pm matinee at S$30 from SISTIC. For more details, visit http://www.dansfestival.com/2014/