Editorial Team
Publication Date
December 18, 2023
Gabriela Meléndez Rivera, GPJ Puerto Rico
Naomi Curbelo, one of the founders of Las Libertas, dances during the Live Jazz Cabaret Show, an event created to break away from traditional strip clubs.
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Naomi Curbelo goes by the stage name Trendy. She wears a short pink skirt with feathers attached to the hem. Black heart-shaped pasties cover her nipples, and a shimmering bra falls over her breasts. Smiling, she emerges to meet her audience at Tabú Exotic Bodega, a restaurant in the capital. Jazz and the Puerto Rican saxophonist LuisFra Colón play in the background.
Curbelo climbs the pole next to the bar. The audience holds its collective breath while she holds herself aloft. She spins around, legs open in a horizontal line. Her partner is Hilary Rodríguez, stage name Selva, and she wears the same outfit. When her turn comes, she ascends the pole, whirls around it, stops and, holding on with only her legs, lets her torso fall.
The event, which goes by the moniker Live Jazz Cabaret Show, was produced by both dancers. They founded the group Las Libertas one year ago to hold pole-dancing events in which they could perform on their own creative terms and operate under their own rules.
“We are women who have learned how to break away from the stigma and the roles society imposes on us as people who practice pole-dancing, which is thoroughly stigmatized,” Rodríguez says.
Just like Las Libertas, other pole-dancers in San Juan and Mayagüez have opted to arrange performances where they control their workspace and have more freedom to create a wider variety of shows, in clear contrast with traditional strip clubs, which tend to be run by men and where the dancers interviewed say they have endured hostile environments. They say that in those clubs, they are required to tip employees and pay fees to perform, in addition to suffering verbal abuse and receiving fines for not complying with internal policies.
Self-run spaces versus traditional clubs
In Puerto Rico, there are at least 12 strip clubs that offer pole-dance shows. Most are located in the San Juan area. In these clubs, dancers do not receive wages for their work. Instead, their earnings come from customers’ tips and a percentage of what the clubs charge for the private dances they provide.
Every night, they must pay tips from out of this income to the club’s employees: DJs, servers, bartenders and “boxers” (the people who collect the money thrown by the audience). Paying them ensures good relationships and collaboration in the workplace. It guarantees the dancers that they will be able to perform and that the music they request will be played for their dances that night.
“That fee [for the DJs] should not even exist — we earn our own wages,” says Bryan Modesto, who has worked for two years as a DJ in a strip club. If the dancers do not pay the DJs, they could lose their turn on stage, receive no support in enlivening the audience or be publicly reprimanded over the microphone.
By contrast, Las Libertas establish ticket prices for their events, including all expenses for both production and wages for the artists. “When people come to our events, the experience does not cease to be erotic or sensual, but we are building it ourselves,” says Rodríguez, who has also been working at traditional strip clubs for a year.
Curbelo started out as a professional ballet dancer with a well-known company in Puerto Rico, but the pay was not enough. “Looking for alternatives, I started doing burlesque shows and working as a stripper in a club,” she says. By the time Curbelo delved into pole-dancing, Rodríguez was already a well-known fixture in the field. “People started coming out of nowhere, asking me to teach them,” Rodríguez says. The two met at an academy as pole-dance instructors and started practicing together. That’s where the idea came from, they say.
The audience at the Live Jazz Cabaret Show includes couples of all ages and groups of girlfriends, their eyes on Las Libertas, awestruck. Generally, most spectators at strip clubs are men. “At our events, we have more control, and we feel more comfortable and freer,” Curbelo says. They have the authority to remove any person who oversteps their boundaries. Curbelo describes the audience at their events: “It’s people who want to see me for my art, not necessarily to consume my body.”
Pole-dancers who live outside the metropolitan area have also begun to seek independence from traditional strip clubs and put on shows to explore other types of erotic performance.
On the stage at Botánica Lounge in Mayagüez, on the west coast of Puerto Rico, Jenni Ruiz, an actress and dancer, explains the rules of the show. “Do not record video footage without permission. If you want attention from one of the girls, you have to speak to her. And please don’t touch the poles,” she says over the microphone, jokingly threatening the audience with her whip.
The event is called La Osadía, and it is designed to simulate the dynamic of a traditional strip club in a traditional bar. Tickets cost 20 United States dollars. Six artists perform on two poles. Tips are expected, and private dances carry an additional cost.
The hostess announces Akila Coraza, the first dancer and the show’s producer. She sports black thigh-high boots with about 10-inch heels and a black leotard that exposes her stomach and back. As soon as she steps onstage and climbs the pole, the audience, made up mostly of women, begins to launch dollar bills at her.
Akila Coraza, like other women interviewed, asked to be referred to by her stage name to protect her privacy. “I started out as a stripper in 2019. A year in, I realized that I liked pole-dancing, and I saw more possibilities to earn money within the industry but in a more artistic fashion,” she says of her beginnings at age 20.
Weaving networks and creating security
Akila Coraza is part of the collective Entre Putxs, which emerged during the pandemic as a support network for all types of sex workers in Puerto Rico. The group comprises erotic dancers, pole-dancers, cam models and others providing sensual and sexual services. Entre Putxs organizes meetings on such subjects as safety, health and well-being. It also produces a podcast and offers protection and care to network members.
As a member, Akila Coraza organized La Osadía, a pop-up strip club — the first of its kind in Mayagüez. “They are spaces where you can be a stripper and have an awesome time. They’ve secured my autonomy and my capacity to create and earn my own livelihood,” she says.
In nearly all strip clubs, pole-dancers pay a fee of between 60 and 100 dollars per night to be able to work there. And a club’s popularity can drive the fee up. Meanwhile, the opposite is encouraged in self-run spaces. In the case of La Osadía, artists earn 200 dollars plus tips.
Karaya, another dancer and member of Entre Putxs, compares their events to traditional clubs: “They are complete opposites.” Strip clubs impose fines if dancers break certain rules, such as arriving late, leaving early, dancing off of the stage, not using high heels, not providing the desired number of private dances, and exposing — unintentionally — certain parts of their bodies. “I’m going to pay you to come and dance, and you earn your money. Do what you have to do and how you want to do it,” Karaya says about how she manages the dancers at the events she produces.
In the dressing room at Botánica Lounge, Dulce Malicia, one of the evening’s performing artists, removes her tips from a metal bucket. Akila Coraza, moved to tears, dabs her face, taking care not to smudge her makeup. She dreams of opening her own club and providing a safe and permanent space for dancers. “I’m grateful to have chosen this. I have autonomy and security with all the gray areas,” she says, acknowledging that not everything is black or white, good or bad, in the world of pole-dancing. “Even while doing many things differently and on my terms, it’s still art.”
Gabriela Meléndez Rivera is a Global Press Journal associate reporter based in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.
TRANSLATION NOTE
Shannon Kirby, GPJ, translated this story from Spanish.
