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[title]When Kamolthip ‘O’ Tangtheintong, co-founder of Fly Me to the Moon Pole & Aerial Studio in Ari, signed up for her first pole dancing class, Bangkok had two pole studios that she knew of and one word for the whole thing. It wasn't ‘fitness’.
She wasn’t looking for a new life. She left a job as communications director at Ogilvy Public Relations in 2015 for a better work-life balance and opened Shaka Grill & Bar, a comfort-food place on Ari Soi 6. Since the restaurant didn't open until lunch, she had her mornings free for the first time in her thirties and had no idea what to do with them. She bought 10 pole classes.
‘I thought it would be easy, a sexy dance,’
O says.
‘It was totally challenging. You need mental strength and muscle strength, and I didn't do well.’
She only kept going because she’d paid. Then, without noticing, she was hooked.
‘Everyone was so supportive. It was like entering combat together with people you don't know, fighting the same battle. There’s no rival except yourself.’
Fly Me to the Moon opened in Ari in 2016, founded by three colleagues from the Ogilvy office.
For two years, O says, the studio broke even and no more. Facebook ads brought nobody. Students came by word of mouth, two or three to a class, seven on a good day, often with the same concerns. O can still recite them. Am I too old, at 45? Too heavy? Does it matter that I’ve never danced or done any sport? Do I have to wear those clothes? Her answer never changed: come and try, and don't feel pressured.
The classes were never the problem. The word was. To many of the people O spoke to in 2016, pole meant strippers and nightclubs. She kept hearing the same questions: why do you need to do this? What is it for – just to be sexy?
‘They couldn't get that it could be a lifestyle, a hobby, self-improvement,’ she says. People around her told her she’d be bored within two years.
‘I'm still here,’ she says. ‘Ten years.’ What kept her going wasn’t the money. ‘Every day we came to the studio we felt we’d gained something, but not financially. People were happier. We heard stories about how it changed their lives. So we thought, this must be a good thing. We have to continue.’
Hence the name. ‘On earth you might just stick to reality,’ O says.
‘We chose the moon. Everyone needs an escape.’
Pole, to her, doesn't have to mean one thing. ‘We are the combination of stripper, sports and arts. Don't deny your roots. You have the space to do it your way
Then came Covid, and the lockdown that kept the studio dark for months. In September 2021, Blackpink’s Lisa released ‘LALISA’, with a pole routine in the video. O remembers enquiries pouring in when the studio reopened, with new students asking to learn the moves from the video, and says enquiries have continued to rise. ‘We were so proud,’ she says. ‘Lisa is doing pole.’ Her songs went on in every class. For O, it was a moment when pole became more visible and easier to talk about.
O puts the studio’s current numbers at around seven classes a day, 300 students a week and 17-20 instructors, with 20-30 students from that first year still attending. Most students are Thai, with a foreigner or two in each class, she says, and they range in age from 11 to 55. Those early worries still walk through the door, but O sees no reason for them to stop someone trying.
‘We have dentists, lawyers, doctors, business owners. And we have sex workers,’
she says.
Whoever you are outside, in here you’re learning on the same poles.
The backs of your knees can hurt in ways you weren’t expecting, where the pole grips skin you didn’t know could grip. Then there’s the gap between deciding to move and moving. Your brain says go; your body stays exactly where it is. When it finally follows, you can find yourself holding your whole weight with a strength you had no idea you had. That, to O, is the whole studio.
‘It’s just a room. It’s the people who make it. They cry, they fall, they laugh, they try again.’
One student changed how she teaches. She came out of class in tears: she’d shown a friend her pole video and the friend had called her fat. ‘She asked why the teachers had lied to her, telling her she was doing great,’ O says. ‘I realised that being an instructor also means helping people learn to listen to the voice that encourages them and helps them grow.’
Ten years on, women with that list of worries are still coming, and O says the worry changes shape once they’re in the room. ‘People come thinking it’s about how they look. I have stretch marks, I have dark spots, I have so many flaws. After a pole class those flaws aren’t flaws any more, because you’re focused on getting the trick done. The outside stops mattering as much as the inside.’
That’s inside the studio. Outside, O says, the stigma hasn’t gone, but it’s thinner. Lisa performed pole in ‘LALISA’ and again on the Born Pink tour, Bangkok’s studio scene has grown beyond the two O first knew and students post their own routines online. The comment sections haven’t always caught up. ‘Men comment on your body,’ she says. ‘Students come to me depressed, asking how I cope.’ Some still keep their pole videos on a second Instagram account, away from their employers.
There are signs of change, and some come from unexpected places. Not long ago, a husband messaged the studio to buy a class pack for his wife, who used to train there before having a baby and had been struggling since. ‘He wanted her to be herself again,’ O says, ‘not just a mother. Because this was what she loved.’
On October 18 2026, Fly Me to the Moon celebrated its tenth anniversary with The Museum of Becoming at Curu Gallery. O says the showcase will feature 36 performers, half of them students, whose portraits will hang on the gallery walls before the people in them step out from their frames and perform.
One has been on a pole for less than a year. It will be the first time she has performed anything in her life, and she has chosen ‘This Is Me’ from The Greatest Showman because, she told O, every line is about her. In her first classes, her palms sweated so badly she’d slide off the pole before a routine was over. O told her to hang in there: hands toughen up. Instead, she disappeared for a fortnight and, O says, came back having had Botox injections in her palms, a treatment used to reduce excessive sweating.
‘A girl in her twenties, who’d never had any injection in her life,’ O says. ‘Wanting her hands to be rough so she could stay on the pole.’ At the first full run-through, ‘everyone cried. I cried like a baby. She was flying.’
The student is Jane. She remembers those first classes a little differently, ‘I went by myself,’ she says. ‘My palms get really sweaty and I'd never done pole before. But my classmates cheered me on and encouraged me. ‘The song, to her, is about ‘having the courage to be yourself and letting yourself be seen. I’m really proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone.’
Ten years in, what she’s proudest of isn’t a trick or a number. It’s that no two students come out the same. ‘We never create the same artist twice. Everyone has their own shine, waiting to be discovered. I’m proud of every attempt to begin again.’
This year, O started taking pole out of the studio and into ordinary places. Her thinking is simple: if people only picture pole behind a bar’s closed doors, that’s all they’ll think it is. So put it where people actually go: a shop, a gallery, a hair salon. ‘Pole doesn't have to stay in a studio or a nightclub,’ she says. ‘It can be anywhere – any place you feel you can be yourself.’
So far, she says, that has meant a lululemon event, the opening of Fundao, the Thai leather-goods brand, and this month Tur hair salon. The salon idea came from a stylist who saw a Fly Me to the Moon photoshoot and loved the way hair falls when someone is hanging upside down. He asked if he could do O's hair and photograph her on the pole. She suggested bringing the pole to him instead. By the end of the afternoon, every stylist had had a go.
‘None of them had ever touched a pole,’ she says. ‘They didn't expect it to be that fun.’ The pairing made sense to her. ‘Everyone comes out of a salon a different person. It’s the same on the pole.’
If she could go back to the day she bought those first 10 classes, she knows what she’d tell herself. "If you're curious about something and it isn’t going to hurt anyone, just try. Don’t let the outside voices stop you. I didn’t know pole was going to be this big a part of my life. If I’d kept listening to what other people said, I might never have started.’
Climb on
Fly Me to the Moon offers introductory pole classes for complete beginners. A first class costs B395 for new members, while a 10-class pack costs B4,100, valid for two months. Packs ranging from five to 35 classes. If you need a class taught in English, check availability when booking, along with current offers and pack terms.
Find the studio on 5/F, Baan Yoswadi Building, 34 Phahon Yothin Soi 7 (Soi Ari), Samsen Nai, Phaya Thai, Bangkok 10400, near BTS Ari. The October timetable includes classes ending at 9pm on weekdays and 7pm at weekends. Opening and self-practice times vary, so check the timetable before visiting. Tel: 091-756-4192. Instagram: @flymetothemoon_pole_aerial. Book through LINE.