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Shirtless and barefoot, Jake Nguyen quietly squeezes past bustling tables as he makes his way towards the center of The Red Pavilion’s packed dining space. Awaiting him is an aerial hoop, also called a lyra, hanging from the ceiling between a circle of Chinese lanterns. As the DJ starts the music, the room falls silent, and Nguyen takes one last deep breath — “I do have stage fright,” he told me, “even as an artist” — before stepping out into the spotlight.
In no time at all, he’s airborne, his metallic pants and eyeliner shimmering under the neon lights of the lanterns as he soars over the audience, striking backbending poses and twirling around at dizzying speeds. The crowd claps and lets out approving hoots as he expertly weaves through the lyra, his feet barely ever touching the ground.
“Oh my god, it’s amazing — I mean the audience,” Nguyen said. “It’s great to hear their clapping every time, it’s like ‘Oh, I’m doing it right, I’m doing it right.’”
At the end of his performance, Nguyen nimbly slips out of the lyra to a roar of applause and the yells of Felicia Oh — “I’m asking for the audience, not myself, are you single?” — a local, Taiwanese drag queen and host of tonight’s show. Nguyen was one of a handful of artists from Subtle Asian Polers, an Asian American aerial and pole dancing community founded by Ai Nguyen, who performed in The Red Pavilion’s April 20th Forbidden Dream production.
This is Nguyen’s first time at the Red Pavilion, an alluring Asian Neo-Noir nightclub located at an incongruous intersection in Bushwick, Brooklyn, hidden behind floor-to-ceiling crimson, velvet curtains. The venue was created last year in response to a surge in Asian hate, and serves to spotlight Asian American/Pacific Islander talent, like Subtle Asian Polers.
Other artists like Nguyen take to The Red Pavilion stage donning eight-inch heels, bedazzled leotards and bright thongs, earning them an admiring “Yes, diva!” from Felicia Oh. As the afternoon continues, pole dancers stretch into the splits mid air, a bride-to-be gets a lap dance from a bendy Harley Quinn look-alike, and audience members dance-battle it out on the stage after answering some of Felicia Oh’s essential questions (“Name, pronouns and favorite sex position?”).
Yoon Joo Cho came with a friend to watch the performances, and the two were craning their necks to catch every moment of the show, particularly the pole dancers.
“It was like seeing a bunch of slaying divas,” Cho said, nursing her second bottle of Tsingtao, a typical Chinese beer. “It was hot, it was sexy.”
Cho watches with wide eyes as Rachel Slack and Mox Lee execute a smooth doubles pole routine in matching red leotards, working with each other’s bodies to create a seamless illusion of walking through air.
“Of course it’s nice to do something like a solo routine but doing a doubles routine is like a whole other level,” Lee said.
Nguyen, like the other artists, works a day job — a women’s apparel designer. Yet everyday he finds time to prepare for his performances, coming up with unique choreography and hand-making all his outfits — “I have yet to repeat an outfit.”
Behind the bedazzled outfits and spellbinding routines lies a strong sense of community. Being half Filipino and Swedish, Lee said that Subtle Asian Polers helps her reckon with the constant identity crisis she is faced with —“I feel more Asian than anything, but you know, genes.” Slack also feels similarly, finding a sense of belonging in the group.
“I’ve made a lot of good friends through the group, and it’s nice to connect with other Asian dancers,” Slack said. “I’m adopted and my parents are Caucasian, and sometimes I feel a little bit disconnected from the community, so this has kind of helped me reconnect with that.”
Nguyen finds it empowering to be part of such a unique Asian dance community, and thinks that more representation is needed in these areas, particularly to show that Asians “are not these meek, demure” people.
“We’re always perceived as reserved individuals but we can be more than that,” Nguyen said. “We can be strong, we can be powerful, we can be smart, and we can be sexy.”