Our Bendy, Zendy Pole Unicorn – Meet Amy Hazel
Recently I sat down (aka “zoomed”) with our one and only pole dancing unicorn – the amazing Amy Hazel. While she is as sweet as honey and you want to just pop her in your pocket, Amy Hazel has grown up in our industry and it has helped shape her into the strong, focused young woman we know and love today. She did come sweeping in and smashing competition stages as fiercely as a wrecking ball, but unlike Hollywood child stars, Amy Hazel has remained incredibly down to earth and as gorgeous as ever!
So where did this colourful, mystical creature come from? Melbourne born, Amy moved to Hong Kong when she was still a bub. She called Hong Kong home until she was 14, and then she made the move back to Melbourne to attend boarding school. After graduating high school, Amy tells me she went to university in England for 1 year to study underwear and swimwear design. “It wasn’t for me. Like I love designing and I love lingerie and swimwear, but I couldn’t see myself in that industry, it was just a little bit too cut throat and yeah – not for me,” Amy tells me.
After leaving university in England, Amy returned to Hong Kong for one more year, before moving back to Melbourne, Australia. It was through this journey after high school, that pole dancing entered Amy Hazel’s life. “I actually started pole the year before I moved to England for Uni. I started pole at Pole Divas and I was getting up to elite levels. Then I was really close to getting into comps, but then I got accepted into the university in England and I was like ‘oh no, I have a really tough decision! Do I keep poling or do I do this [design course], that I’ve been wanting to do forever?’ So I ended up giving it a go over in England and it was just not my thing, and I missed dancing so much, so I ended up just being like you know what, maybe I’ll try and be a pole dancer,” she says.
Well, aren’t we all SO glad she did!
Amy started learning how to pole dance in 2010, and about 2-3 years later she decided to start competing. One of her earliest performances was the ‘Freestyler’ performance in 2012. When asked if this was her very first comp routine, Amy laughs, reminiscing about her baby poler performance saying, “OMG that was!! No I think that was the year later? The first one I did was just like a complete mess and a flop and I was just like ‘oh my god what have I just done?’ So freestyler was the second one I ever did!” Giggling she continues, “I was such a baby then! I was still living in Hong Kong at that time. It was funny, I did a comp prior to that which was horrible, then I did that comp and then the next comp I did was Miss Pole VIC!!”
WOW talk about jumping heels first into the deep end! Amy continues, sharing with me the story about her very first Miss Pole.
“I was planning on moving back to Australia but I was currently still living in Hong Kong, so I’d flown over for the heats, I stayed for a bit afterwards and I was waiting at the airport for my flight home. No one had really heard of me back then. I was the first performer of the night in Miss Pole VIC, and I was at the airport and they were going to announce the lineup for the finals, Miss Pole Dance Australia, on that day! They were calling me to get on the plane and I was like ‘just wait!’. I was refreshing the screen and they were like, ‘it’s last call you’ve got to get on the plane’ and I was like ‘one second!’. I refreshed it, and then it came out – I was on there! And I was like ‘OHHH MY GOD!!’. I then had to sit on the plane for 9 hours back to Hong Kong with the most amazing news in the world and I couldn’t tell anyone!!”
Amy continues, “So I literally went from like the worst performance I’ve ever done, second performance I’ve ever done, third performance, and then got wildcarded into the [Miss Pole Dance Australia] finals! So I never really had an opportunity to do any of the amateur [comps] prior to or after that.”
While being wildcarded into Miss Pole Australia is incredible, I asked Amy if she found it difficult because all of a sudden, she was expected to step up to a professional level after just THREE comps!! “Exactly, it was kind of like ‘chucked in the deep end’ because once you’ve done Miss Pole Australia you can no longer ever do an amateur comp. So I was like oh my god now I’m professional from the get go!” she says.
It did however have it’s advantages, as Amy continues, “I like being chucked in the deep end and just being told to figure it out and do it. So it was a really good motivation to get good. I remember at the heats I tried to do a Rainbow [Marchenko] at the end of the routine and I was about to fall out, so I didn’t, and I just held some weird shape. And then I was like ‘omg I’ve gotten into finals I need to actually be able to do Rainbow I can’t just hold this like awkward shape if I’m about to fall out of it!’ So from the heats and then to the finals, I worked with a contortion coach and I was like I’ve got to make this perfect. I really, really put a lot of effort into training to become better.”
Amy didn’t just become better, she became INCREDIBLE!! Some of Amy Hazel’s titles include:
PCS Arnold Classic 2019 – 2nd place
Miss Pole Dance VIC 2017/18 - 1st place
Miss Pole Dance Australia 2017/18 - 1st place (the Lady Marmalade performance)
Miss Pole Dance Australia 2016/17 - 3rd place (the My Little Pony routine)
Miss Pole Dance VIC 2015/16 - 1st place
Aerial All Stars 2015 – 1st place (the Stairway to Heaven routine)
Pole Theatre Classique HK 2015 – 1st place
Miss Pole Dance VIC 2014/15 - 2nd place
Miss Pole Dance Australia 2014/15 - 3rd place (the Genie routine)
Victorian Pole Championships 2014 – 2nd place
Beijing International Pole Championship – 3rd place
As well as her MPDA winning ‘Lady Marmalade’ show, some of Amy’s favourites include her Miss Pole Dance Australia ‘Geanie in a Bottle’ performance (so much cute and sexy in one show!), her Nirvana performance at Miss Pole as well as her winning Aerial All Stars performance to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’. “That’s still one of my favourites,” Amy tells me. “Only because that song is so powerful to me – I love it! It pinpoints a really awesome time in my life, and I still really remember that moment.”
Amy Hazel has also competed a couple of times at the Felix Cane Pole Championships, in some very memorable performances. Along with being a naughty night pixie in one, we learned in another show about Amy’s weakness for peanut butter. She laughs when I ask her about this show saying, “So I loveeee peanut butter! I used to have peanut butter and jam sandwiches but now I have peanut butter and banana sandwiches.” But I put her to the real peanut butter lover test – smooth or crunchy? “Crunchy!! Oh my god crunchy all the way!! But I had to use smooth for the show, because it wouldn’t run if it was crunchy! The day before I bought like heaps of peanut butter and then I realised it had to be the organic smooth, because another was like play dough. So organic, smooth, peanut butter drips like really good!” she says. There’s a life lesson they don’t teach at school!
Keeping us all on our toes, it is rare that Amy Hazel brings the same show from heats to finals of a comp. While she didn’t have as much time to prep for a comp, through touring and doing shows and performances constantly of 3-4 minutes, Amy tells me it was easier to prepare as she was always able to maintain the level of fitness a pole comp requires. “I usually choreograph a lot just in a notebook, and then I’ll probably start training it a week or two out – I really like last minute!!” Amy says laughing. “Before I stopped training, I was pretty certain that I could do everything that I wrote down. It wasn’t until I stopped training for a little bit, and then I would write a little combo and I would try it and I would be like oh my god like I can’t do that anymore! Whereas my old self would have just been like yep this, this, this, this – done!” she tells me.
Amy Hazel’s ‘old self’ was one wild adventure, winning sashies and touring the world for pole dance workshops regularly. Having lived overseas in her childhood and travelling a lot as a kid, touring never phased Amy, as she tells me, “I've travelled a lot, even when I lived in Hong Kong, every year we flew somewhere new for our summer holidays, so I saw a lot of the world from a young age. So for me travelling to different countries doesn’t really bother me because I love every culture and they all have something awesome to bring. I’m not set in stone in the way I have to live my life, so I’m very, very adaptable to what each country brings.”
It was bittersweet though as Amy continues, “The only thing that I started to really find hard was not having someone to share my experiences with when I go overseas. Like I’d be in a beautiful place and I’d go for a hike with someone (who I’d probably just met that week) and I’d see all these beautiful things, but then once I leave it’s like, who do I share the story with? I want to share experiences with someone who is going to stay with me forever. So it started to get really sad and lonely in that way.”
Amidst this, Amy will still be forever grateful for the experiences she had. “The things I loved were seeing new cities and being shown by a local around the new cities. Meeting heaps of people, seeing how people do things in different parts of the world – you really get looked after by everyone around the world,” she says.
The New Amy Hazel
In the last year or two, Amy Hazel has shifted her focus, and while she isn’t dazzling us on stage as frequently, she has continued to evolve and explore many new ways of being. While it doesn’t come bearing a sash, this level of growth in itself has been a huge achievement for Amy. Taking a step back from the competitive side of pole dance, Amy has been able to explore studio owner life and dive deeper into her passion for yoga and study of naturopathy.
In mid-2019 Amy Hazel became a co-owner of Blackbird Studios in Victoria. Having danced the path of performer and instructor, studio owner life was a new journey for Amy – but it’s one she has come to love!
“I really love it. It’s that extra security and it’s really nice to be able to support other people, other instructors and students in growing their own pole journeys. And it’s also given me a bit of time to then focus on myself and do things without the pressure of having to teach to earn money. It’s kind of a nice change,” she tells me. Compared with her turbulent past life of travelling for workshops and performances, the pole studio has been able to provide stability to Amy’s life.
“There was a period 2 years ago where I had no home and I was living out of a car, living in a gym, living at like friends’ houses on their couches. And I went from having really no security at all for about 9-10 months, to now owning an apartment with my partner and having the studio. It was like such a relief – it was weight off the shoulders. Like not knowing where I was going to sleep one night, or where I was going to cook a meal – it was hard,” she says reflecting on this time in her life.
This new focus of self-love and putting the brakes on a fast-paced lifestyle was kickstarted after many years of struggling with an eating disorder. “It started when I was 12 actually, I was bullied at school and then from there I decided to just eat 1 apple a day and do 7 hours of exercise a day. So it really started young but I was always into exercise. When I moved to boarding school when I was 14, I kind of went on an up again and I gained weight again and I got to a healthy weight range. Then I went back down again when I was about 19 to 21, and then back up and back down when I was 24/25, and then back up now. It’s always yo-yoed, and it’s a big yoyo of about 10-15 kgs,” she explains.
I wondered how Amy could achieve such a level of success as a competitive pole dancer, yet was struggling with her self-image over the years. How is it, that onstage she could be such a bendy beacon of confidence but behind the scenes Amy was troubled with her yo-yoing health and weight?
“I had always craved attention. Growing up – my brother was very extroverted and I was always quiet and unnoticed. So I only found that I got attention was when I was skinny or dancing. I felt that dancing was something my brother couldn’t do – and was a way that I could have all the attention for those 3 minutes. As much as I didn’t like my body – being onstage and having compliments really boosted my spirits and made happy about my body for a moment,” Amy tells me so honestly.
It was through her experience with eating disorders, that Amy Hazel found her love of naturopathy.
"I think stemming from the eating disorder I only every wanted to eat something that was going to do something beneficial to me. So I wanted to cure myself naturally. The only reason I started to eating again after my eating disorder was because I wanted my hair back. The things that were healthy for hair was like salmon and avocado and oil, so I ended up just eating things that would bring my hair back. It was kind of like, if it didn’t have a meaning to me I wouldn’t eat it. So that’s why I got really fascinated with how food does different things in the body and how you can heal yourself with herbs and everything,” she says passionately.
Besides having luscious locks (no really – her hair has transformed into every curly girls dream hair!), other benefits of Amy’s lifestyle changes have included having more energy, and actually being able to generate body heat. She explains, “I feel more alive and energetic. I used to feel like if someone asked me to do something it would be a strenuous task to do anything, but now I’m like ‘oh yeah I have energy to do that’. And I used to be freezing all the time – now I feel like a much warmer body. I actually feel like I can warm myself up, whereas before I was just constantly cold.”
Amy started her healing process by taking a step back from dedicated pole and fitness training, and began taking a more chilled approach to her life. Still teaching 2 days a week, she finds that it is enough training for the moment. So what does our pole champion Amy Hazel fill in her time with now?
Along with cooking, knitting, playing board games and The Sims, she has found other great loves besides naturopathy. “I have puppy dog so I look after her. Her name is Mila, so we look after her, I go for walks, little bit of yoga – that’s about it!” she says.
Last year Amy did her yoga teacher training and loved it. “It was really, really good. Not only physically learning the practice, but mentally learning how to deal with things in life. It was a really good philosophy lesson and it makes you realise that yoga isn’t actually about the postures, it’s about your way of thinking. A lot of people think yoga is like trying to get these certain shapes with the body but it’s actually a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of dealing with situations,” Amy tells me.
Making such a significant change to her world has not come easily however and it took Amy a few months to adjust. “I was doing a lot of research on my own and number one thing was to stop exercising so much and really focus on nurturing your body more. I was really agitated and angsty when I first stopped because I was so used so much exercise. Like I would run, I would gym, I would dance – I would do everything! So it was hard and I got a lot of restless nights, it felt like I had extra energy that I had to burn. Then I just started to really tell myself it’s okay and I had to do a lot of mental work to overcome that and now it doesn’t bother me to sit at home all day! It’s very helpful in the situation now!” she says with a giggle referring to our current COVID19 iso-life.
Don’t worry, the pole world hasn’t lost their favourite dancing unicorn forever! We were treated by Amy Hazel a little over a month ago with her performance at the first Exotic Generation Australia! Amy’s hippy-inspired performance was mesmerizing, as we were taken on a trippy, flared-pants-and-pasties journey to a killer Glass Animals tune.
So was it hard for Amy to return to the stage once again? “I sort of did a very similar training to what I always did, like writing in the notebook and then trying it out, but I was definitely not pushing myself to do anything out of my comfort zone or what I couldn’t already do. I just kept it quite simple and flowy and just did the things that I really wanted to do,” Amy tells me.
She goes on to add, “I wanted to prove to others that you don’t need to do epic crazy things to be on stage. That it’s okay just do what you feel comfortable doing, you don’t have to ruin your body just to be able to be on stage.”
We were also happily surprised with a guest performance by Amy Hazel and her partner Jake, at Dance for a Difference in 2018. The pair whipped out all sorts of intertwining, bendy, balancing acro-tricks which had us all practicing our headstands for days after. So what was it like sharing the stage with her boyfriend?
“It was really good! It was really nice to share the stage with him! He was super, super nervous but it was really sweet and I was so glad he said yes to doing it. He was like ‘I dunno if I can do this, I don’t know if I’m ready’ and I was like ‘just don’t think about it – just do it!’,” Amy says laughing. So did Jake catch that glittering stage bug? “No he was like ‘I think I’m done! I think I’ll leave the stage for you!’ I would have loved to do more!” she says in a giggle.
Whether she is onstage or working hard behind the scenes on her studies and studio, Amy Hazel continues to be an inspiration for pole dancers all over the world. Her strength and passion isn’t only limited to the stage, as Amy opens up and shares her journey hoping to pass on her knowledge and instill beaming confidence in others. Her newly found dedication to holistic wellbeing, shines brightly through her life as a pole and yoga teacher, aspiring naturopath, and of course, a knitting-Sims playing-cavoodle puppy mum!
So what’s next for our playful pole unicorn? “Continue studying, the studio, being happy.. I think this year just take it as it is. Just keep enjoying life!” Amy Hazel tells me, with a blissful smile.
Follow Amy’s journey on Instagram - @amyhazel92
