Cosmic Grip performs at PoleCon West: 2025

The Long Game: Social Media for PoleCon Workshop Leaders (Part 2)

October 30, 2026
Tamie Nigma
Business Tips, General

How to build a world around your performance

In Part 1, I talked about playing the long game with workshop promotion: building familiarity before asking anyone to register. In Part 2, we’re bringing that same approach to the stage, where the goal is to build anticipation. Instead of signing up for a class, we’re asking people to carve out time in an already packed convention weekend to see us perform.

With Cosmic Grip, we’ve shared everything from troupe introductions to costume teases and questionable rehearsal ideas. The choreography is only part of the story.

Give them a world, not just a trailer

For our 2026 Troupes & Groups performance, people met the cast, saw rehearsals, and caught glimpses of costumes and characters before seeing the finished choreography. Gradually, an increasingly ridiculous demon-idol universe took shape.

By the time we arrived at PoleCon, the performance already had a personality.

Worldbuilding doesn’t always require fictional characters, either. Sometimes you’re simply giving people a chance to get to know you before the show.

Consider what might make someone curious:

What relationships or personalities shape the act?
What do the music and visuals suggest?
Is there one unexpected detail worth teasing?

Sometimes a tiny clue is more interesting than a full trailer.

If your audience already knows a seasonal, touring, or competition piece, you don’t need a slow reveal. Show them what’s different about this PoleCon appearance: the staging, the setting, or a story they haven’t heard.

Mystery is a tool, not a requirement.

Let the unfinished parts have personality

Whether your act is new or familiar, the polished stage photo isn’t the only part worth sharing. Strange rehearsal cues, costume experiments, inside jokes, and ideas discovered by accident deserve their moment, too.

Those moments don’t undermine the performance. They help people connect with the work and the people making it.

Not everything needs to live on your feed, either. Stories can capture the messier timeline, while Notes might carry a joke that only makes sense later. For more on timing and Instagram formats, see Part 1.

Give people the pleasure of watching something develop without explaining every creative choice before showtime.

Different acts, recognizable artists

That behind-the-scenes familiarity can follow you into the next act, even when the performances look nothing alike. Ours certainly don’t.

Our first PoleCon appearance had us dressed as Ric Flair and “Macho Man” Randy Savage, looking ridiculously unlike ourselves. Since then, we’ve appeared as God and Jesus, K-pop idols and demons.

Even as our music, styling, and characters change, Cosmic Grip still comes through in the partner movement, trust, theatricality, strong visuals, a little chaos, and how much fun we’re having. Your signature might come through humor, movement choices, concepts, or even captions.

Worldbuilding gives an act its identity. Branding helps people recognize the artists behind them.

Give your past work a supporting role

And sometimes the best way to introduce new work is to show where it came from.

Our 2025 God-and-Jesus PoleCon act grew from a stage-pole piece we first performed at a cinema-themed variety show in 2023. Revisiting that early footage showed how the characters and movement had evolved.

Your creative history gives audiences context they wouldn’t get from a single performance.

Let PoleCon week be the payoff

By convention week, all those glimpses of your work should add up to something people are excited to see. Share your strongest preview, the showcase schedule, and exactly when to find you.

Then PoleCon does half the content creation for you: costumes, reunions, hallway antics, travel shenanigans, and pole dancers giving in to the hive mind. Document it.

These moments bring the anticipation you’ve built online into real time while giving those following from outside the convention a chance to experience the atmosphere.

But don’t get so absorbed in your own show that you miss everyone else’s. Attend other showcases, cheer for artists you’ve followed online, and meet the people behind the accounts. You’ve spent months building connections through screens; PoleCon is where you finally get to share the room.

The performance isn’t the end of the story

After the showcase, keep that connection going.

Photos, alternate angles, rehearsal-to-stage comparisons, thank-yous, and reflections can give the act a second life.

Our 2024 PoleCon solo debut introduced us to the community. Continuing to share photos and footage afterward helped people remember us and follow what came next.

With social media, the goal isn’t to spend months selling a few minutes onstage. It’s to invite people into the story early enough that they’re invested by showtime and curious about what you’ll create next.

Workshops ask people to sign up; performances ask them to show up. Different invitations, same foundation: give people a reason to care before they arrive. Social media starts that conversation. PoleCon is where we get to continue it together.

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Tamie Nigma

Tami Nigma is a Houston-based pole performer, instructor, and one half of Cosmic Grip, the doubles duo she shares with Sugoi Sammy. Together, they teach and perform everything from floorwork and low flow to aerial tricks, and have brought their work to both the PoleCon stage and classroom. Off the pole, Tami works as a licensed massage therapist and acupuncturist with a background in communication, bringing an anatomy-informed perspective to what bodies can do and what happens when movement becomes a conversation within ourselves and with each other.