Introduce yourself.
My name is Salem and my pronouns are they/them. I am a worker on Gadigal Land.
How long have you been a student at Sky Sirens? What do you do here?
I started Lyra and Pole classes at Sky Sirens in late 2018. Over the last few years, I’ve worked my way through the levelled classes with some Vixenettes and Contemporary classes too!
What do you identify as within the LGBTQIA+ community?
I mostly identify with the label Queer. I figured this out towards my senior years of high school. I had thought about it as a ‘maybe’ because I felt that very strange about wanting specific girls to be my friend - but I couldn’t quite place the feeling or understand what that meant at the time.
For my gender identity, it definitely took me until a few years after high school, where I had come into my queerness a lot more, to really come to terms with identifying as non-binary. Even now and then, I work through dismantling my internalised transphobia as a queer, femme-presenting non-binary person! Because even in the Queer community, a lot of the representation is very white.
I’d like to think that I can incorporate my queerness into my dance style, but I think that’s still very much a work in progress! I’m still developing it as I go along. When I dance for myself, I’m mostly trying to make the basics look good, and the harder things look less messy!
A sensual, erotic style is what I am most comfortable with, so I have been trying to break out of that to see what kind of style I can really develop for myself. Ideally, I’d like to adapt to various styles and mix them - creating something that is uniquely my own. (This is very much a work in progress too!)