First of all, I am pretty excited about the meetup hosted by Drex at the drum circle in Meridian Hill Park (D.C) on Sundays. I met some truly stunning hoopers, including Noelle Powers and Raven, both of whom completely wowed me with their style, and they kind of highlighted something I’ve noticed about my own practice lately.
When we started hooping, Jennifer and I used the Hoopnotica DVDs to learn the basics, and then began learning tricks from online tutorials. Jennifer is an amazing choreographer, so she was able to put a lot of those moves together into a cohesive dance that looked good, and I mostly followed her lead on that, since I don’t really have a good idea of how to put a dance together. Occasionally, I would be struck by something in my practice and turn that into a combo move, but for the most part, I’ve felt like my hooping has been a series of moves that I saw, learned and practiced, then tried to put together in different ways.
Recently, I began to hoop differently, due mostly to my finding some consistent time and space to practice, and a change in my attitude toward my hoop. I have pretty much learned all the common moves there are tutorials for, and with consistent practice, I found I was getting bored with just combining those moves in different ways. Because this happened over the winter, I was also limited in my practice space, and spent a lot of days hooping inside, which forced me to slow down a lot to avoid wrecking our rented house. As I slowed down, and started to spend some days just re-exploring waist hooping in both directions, or chest hooping, or whatever, I noticed that I began to interact with the hoop differently. I noticed that I no longer pushed in only two or four places to keep the hoop going, but I pushed whenever it was needed, which sometimes was once every two or three revolutions, and sometimes it didn’t feel like a push or pull at all, but like the hoop and I were just following one another.
As I started to explore that concept, and extrapolate it to the different planes, hooping became less about something I had to master, and I stopped feeling so frustrated when I couldn’t immediately execute a new trick. In fact, my mistakes lately have often been serendipitous, leading me to moves that no one could have taught me, but have helped me to find a more personal style. This, of course, is an improvisational concept I am familiar with from being a longtime musician and avid cook, but I had somehow missed that spark in my hooping for nearly two years! And believe me, I looked HARD for it at times which may have been the problem!
I’m finding now that the dance comes more naturally, and lately has not at all been the kind of hoop-dancing I set out to do three years ago, after watching all those amazing guys and gals on YouTube and Vimeo. Often, it’s slower, even to fast beats; sometimes it’s funky, and it almost always puts my blissful dancer grin on my face. And this may sound crazy, but I find myself listening to my hoop, or at least to the body part it’s touching, and seeing where IT wants to go, rather than manipulating it to my (very stubborn) will.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 5:43 am and is filed under Colleen. Both comments and pings are currently closed.