If you have spent any time at festivals, university campuses, raves, or dance studios you will have probably noticed the growing popularity of hooping. One of the flow arts (alongside poi, staff-spinning, juggling, and others), hooping has gone from a kitsch 1950s fad that riffed on Polynesian dance to a fully realized medium for performance, exercise, and fun.
The fun is what first attracted me to hooping six years ago. As a kid, I was uncomfortable even dancing around other people; the last thing I wanted was to be the centre of attention, and dancing seemed like the more sure way of being in the spotlight. Any time I would start to come out of my shell at a school dance or a wedding party, someone who knew me would notice and shout for everyone to look, and that was the end of any booty-shaking.
What made hooping different was that I had something to focus on. I had a task to accomplish: keeping the hoop on my hips and moving for as long as I could. It didn’t magically make my self-consciousness disappear, though. The first time in my adult life that I did it for any amount of time, I was alone in my basement after midnight in the exact middle of the room so as not to hit anything with my music turned low enough that it would not wake up my family. It was over a year before I tried to do it in public, let alone outside. I had to figure out the basics of what I was doing first. Those basics were:
1. Find the proper tunes
Have you ever tried dancing without music? It isn’t as fun, at least not for me. Moving my hips just comes more naturally with the right rhythm. Unsurprisingly, the same holds true for hooping. If you move with the beat it is so much easier to remain consistent. And if you are looking to make friends with people who share your interests, there is pretty much no better way than playing a funky song in a park or on the quad.
I like to use Glass Animals and Electro-swing.
2. Find your stance
This can vary from person to person but for the most part, the best way to start is standing with your feet shoulder-width and -length apart with the hoop resting in the small of your back. The foot you place forward should be your dominant one. The direction in which you spin is only dependent on what is most comfortable; some people can go either way and some people cannot. Both are totally fine. Push off in whichever one works for you and sway your hips backwards and forwards to keep it going. Think of it like a full-body shift of your weight from the rear foot to the fore foot. The point on your body of greatest motion is the point that the hoop will move around.
This is also how you get into more advanced techniques, like moving the hoop up and down your body without using your hands. It took a bit of practice, but once I learned how to pop and lock my torso I could move my hoop from my hips to around my neck and back again, which is pretty cool.
3. Be prepared to embarrass yourself
I know I am going to lose some of you here. Any time you do something like this in public, there is a chance that you will embarrass yourself. I cannot count the number of times I have hit myself in the face while trying to do a trick, which seems to happen even more often when someone really hot is watching me do it. But it doesn’t bother me anymore. Even when I have performed in front of over a hundred people, I wasn’t doing it for them. I hoop because it’s fun and it helped me learn to love my body and everything that it can do. And I hope it can help you do the same.