Reflections on Hoop Camp 2009

I attended Hoop Camp in the Redwoods of Santa Cruz this past weekend, and it was certainly the most intense hooping experience that I've ever had. The schedule was jam-packed with workshops, hoop jams, special events and a lot of time to connect with other hoopers from around the world. It certainly pushed my own hooping boundaries, and it was amazing to see how each hooper brought their own unique personality and 'spin' to their hooping style.

What fascinates me about Hoop Dance is that the community is still ripe with creativity and innovation. People work on their specific hoop tricks and dance moves at home, and then come together at these types of gatherings to share and learn from each other. There's a big trend of fusing of insights from other movement arts like Belly dance, poi and aerobic fitness routines as well as bringing in insights from esoteric wisdom traditions like Yoga, the spinning dervishes of Sufi whirling, Buddhist mindfulness and meditative visualizations.

There's so many different specialized moves there's still a lot of vast potential for fusing many other traditions like Native American Hoop Dance, African Dance and Qi Gong just to name a few. What I'm realizing is that at this point, it's really impossible for a single hooper to learn all of the possible hoop moves or body movements. So events like Hoop Camp serve as not only a way to increase of the collective wisdom of the hoop community by swapping tips and tricks, but more importantly it's a time to get re-inspired with what's possible to do inside of the hoop and a chance to connect face-to-face with members of the global hoop community

Inner & Outer Dimensions of Hoop Dance

There's a lot of emerging branches of Hoop Dance, but the two main categories that I see the different workshops emphasizing are either the Inner or Outer aspects of hooping. In practice, Hoop Dance is always some combination of these two, but the workshops tended to focus either on your Inner experience or on the Outer techniques and movements.

The outer-focused sessions tended to focus on the the technical aspects of how we move our hoops and our bodies while the inner-focused sessions would focus on our intentions, visualizations and how the hoop feels to our conscious awareness. The extreme end of Outer would be an emphasis on performance where you focus on how your hooping appears to other people while the extreme Inner would be blindfolded, Hoop Path style jamming with a mindful focus how your hooping feels internally to yourself. Again, you can't have a great performance without having a solid inner foundation, and it's difficult to have profound inner hooping experiences without enough outer technical hoop aptitude.

There was a pretty good mix between the Inner and Outer focused workshops at Hoop Camp this year, which I was happy to see. My intention for the week to focus more on the inner, mindful hooping and not worry about learning a bunch of new moves or tricks, but I was open to experiencing as much of the schedule as I could. In the end, I surprised myself by pushing both the inner and outer apects of my Hoop Dance practice forward, and it made me realize how interconnected these two dimensions are.

Below is an extended run-down of my most salient experiences and memories from Hoop Camp 2009

Opening Ceremony

Photo by Philo Hagen

Hoop Camp started off with organizer Heather Troy gathering everyone in a circle so that we could each introduce ourselves and our intention for the camp. Everyone wrote their intention onto a rock, and then placed it into a hoop mandala built by Kara Spencer of Mandala Hoops.

Photo by Natasha Young

Some of the common themes seemed to be play, joy, connection and learning. One thing that I noticed that almost all of the people had in common is that they've all been somehow transformed through Hoop Dance. Throughout the week, I heard a lot of stories of healing and how people were able to uniquely express their identity through hooping.

One particularly poetic image was of a close-up of the hoop mandala showing a butterfly that had landed on the inside of one of the sculpture's hoops, which I thought was a nice symbol of transformation.

Photo by Philo Hagen

So after the opening circle, the weekend of Hoop workshops began.

Baxter's Hoop Meditation

Photo by Natasha Young

Baxter was the first teacher up to kick off the weekend. I'm a huge fan of Baxter, and he has definitely had one of the biggest influences on me as a hooper. He was the first male hooper I'd ever seen on YouTube, and he definitely inspired me to stick with pursuing my own flavors of off-body hooping. And with 130 women and only about 10 guys at Hoop Camp, males are definitely in the minority in the wider hoop community. So it has been nice to have a bit of a virtual reflection and mirror by watching him over the last year.

Baxter has also been a leader within the meditative branch of Hoop Dance by emphasizing the inner dimensions of conscious hooping with the Hoop Path. I think one of his most profound insights was to use a blindfold while hooping, which he kind of accidentally discovered out of an self-conscious embarrassment from people walking by on the sidewalk and seeing him hoop in his backyard.

But "going blind" while hooping is an excellent technique to block out the visual senses and focus on the experience of hooping, and it often opens up fountains of new flow for me. Baxter is also a great facilitator and really loosened people up for the weekend just as he did in Bend, OR for the Northwest Hoop Gathering.

Photo by Julie Greicius

I also had a chance to have an in-depth talk with Baxter about our respectful approaches to mindful and conscious hooping, the challenges of balancing the facilitation of groups with the cultivation of community, and some of the larger trends in the hooping community.

Rumors were flying around that Wham-O is ramping up to release their latest version of the official Hula Hoop® and so I was curious as to see how he saw how that would affect the hooping ecosystem. It was interesting to hear about some real challenges with the amount of physical space required for hooping and the economics behind that -- which can be a constraining limitation to growth of hoop classes and events such as Hoop Camp.

Candice Schutter: Hooping as Medicine for Life

Photo by Philo Hagen

Next up, Candice Schutter led a group discussion exploring what Hoop Dance has taught people as well as delving into some of the psychological blocks and that we fall into. Candice often quoted Abraham-Hicks as well as number of her spiritual teachers in response to a number of the issues that came up, and she has an elegant way of challenging some negative thought patterns in a non-dogmatic way.

It was a nice way for the group to share both some of their positive transformative experiences from hooping as well as battles with our internal demons, and there were a number of topics that found a lot resonance.

Hoopers Showcase

After cocktails and dinner, we headed down the the Redwood Amphitheater for a showcase of the hooping teachers over the course of the weekend. Philo of hooping.org provided a lot of comedy relief as MC for the evening, and there were a lot of memorable performances.

Photo by Julie Greicius

Rich Porter kicked it off and was in top form in awing the audience with an explosion his signature Isopops and Isobreaks moves. It's like one-part optical illusion that makes you go "WTF?" and another part sacred geometry that's captivating to watch.

Other memorable performances for me were Revolva's Flashdance that ended with her hooping four hoops on all four limbs, Kara's sacred geometry mandala dance, SaFire doing poi, Mary's incredible handstands and follow-up music, Michelle & Becca's flipping around with fearless attitude, Anah and Jamies fluid performance, Shakti and her incredible flow, a philosophical story about living a full life from Stephan, and flagging from Sass and Sparks. There was also some non-hooping talent like an emotional song sung by Miss Rosie. And I just remember thinking that I was watching some of the best hoopers in the world.

Spiral & Julia: Sustained Spinning tips and Performance

Photo by Philo Hagen

The evening then kind of awkwardly moved from the talent show that was running long into brief workshop mode. The evening Hoop Jam was supposed to be starting and so if felt like Julie Hartsell and Spiral had to kind of rush through their tips for sustained spinning. It's a shame since I would have loved to hear more about the insights into the spinning dervishes.

Then Jules and Spiral gave a demo of sustained spinning, which was the most mind-blowing and inspiring grace that I've ever seen. I could feel the audience become totally captivated and filled with awe.

Later that evening at the outdoor hoop jam, I dove head first into sustained spinning filled with inspiration by these last two performances. I was using one of Merlin's PSI Hoops, which actually helped me keep a soft focus and not really get all that dizzy. I was totally hooked on spinning for the rest of the weekend after that.

Part of my intention for the week was to investigate hooping as a spiritual practice, and most of the mindful hoopers I talked to told me that sustained spinning was the fastest way to access the divine through Hoop Dance. And I would find out more as to why that was from Kara at the end of the weekend (more on that down below)

Photo by Barry J Holmes for HoopTechnique.com

Rich Porter was handing out and signing limited-edition lithographs of a photo of himself and Spiral that was taken at Burning Man. On the back it says that a DVD is coming out soon, which is presumably going to be titled Hoop Technique.

Stefan & Meghan the Cat: Cheeky Tosses & Campy Tricks

Photo by Philo Hagen

Stefan Pildes and Meghan the Cat collaborated in demonstrating a number of different tosses. It was interesting to do the partner tossing since I don't usually get a chance to do that, and the pizza toss is a fun but tricky move to pull off with grace.

I do a ton of tosses, and so there wasn't a whole lot of new territory for here for me, but it was interesting to watch Stefan find many, many ways to project the hoop into the air from his body throughout the entire weekend.

Shakti Sunfire: Magnificent Minis

Photo by Philo Hagen

Shakti Sunfire did an intensive exploration of the various different movements with the minis and even though she admitted to kind of being burned out on minis, she went through and shared a lot of the different insights and moves that she had over the past year. The two trickiest ones were the poi-inspired, three-beat weave and thread the needle.

I really enjoyed Shakti's workshop and actually took it twice using a variety of different sizes of mini hoops, while sharing the extra ones that I had to those without any minis.

Kari "Revolva": Hooping Below the Belt

Photo by Philo Hagen

I actually skipped Revolva's workshop to double up on the minis session, but also in part because I took Philo's Below the Belt workshop at Flow, and I usually find leg hooping frustratingly painful and draining. But I will say that I've seen Revolva do some crazy amazing stuff with leg hooping, and by the end of the week I was starting to see more and more people doing a whole variety of crazy headstand leg hooping that was probably seeded in her workshop.

Hoop Marketplace

Photo by Philo Hagen
The Hoop Marketplace was a big deal for a lot of people, but not so much for me. They majority of the wares for sale by the vendors where women's Goddess hoop clothing and accessories, but there was also some full-sized hoops, mini hoops, fire hoops and other beginning hoop DVDs.

Word on the street was that Jasmine Patten's single-piece jumpsuits were a huge hit, and I certainly saw a lot of them by the end of the week. For men, I've found the best hooping clothes option to be Hoop pants from Dirty Snowflake Apparel, but alas Doug didn't make the trip this year to the Hoop Market.

Unity Valentina: Belly-Hoop Dance

Photo by Philo Hagen

Unity has been doing Belly Dancing for about 12 years, and has been at the leading edge of integrating Hoop Dance with Belly Dance. This was a unique workshop in that most of what we did were exercises to start to move our bodies using Belly Dancing techniques without even using the hoop. Belly dancing takes a lot more energy and effort than it may appear, especially if you're watching seasoned professionals.

There was a lot of swinging hips as if you were closing a car door, rotating your shoulders and hips back and forth in 3 different speeds, back-and-forth head movements, walking while waving you arms and balancing the hoop on your head, and even a bonus NSFW, gyration of the hips in a figure-eight while lying down.

Michelle "Spin0da0rella": Two-Hands On

Photo by Philo Hagen

Michelle 'Spin0da0rella" from Baltimore had an interesting "tech" workshop focusing on what kind of moves that you could think of if you were given a constraint of always keeping two-hands on the hoop. She said that these would be particularly good moves if for some reason you really didn't want to drop the hoop.

Photo by Philo Hagen

Apparently we weren't being innovative enough, and so Michelle had us drop our hoops and just freak out. That helped loosen us up, and then Michelle started to walk through some specific two-handed hoop moves that she's come up with including one where you can trace a rectangle going from the front to the back of your body.

Anah "Hoopalicious": Move with Ease & Grace

Jamie Bechtold: Hoopdance Fitness

Photo by Philo Hagen
Anah's workshop was originally supposed to be on the first night, but since the talent show went long, they combined it with Jamie Bechtold's Hoopdance Fitness class. It seemed like a strange combination at first, but it worked out great because I wouldn't have lasted a full session of the Hoopdance Fitness by that point in the weekend.

Anah had a number of exercises and emotional songs to help us get into the mood as we gracefully walked while dragging our feet, walked while swinging our feet out, and did other exercises to work build up our micro-movement muscles. Anah's workshops tend to focus more on the inner experience rather than specific tricks or moves, and so I really loved it and wished that it could have been a full session.

However, the other part of the session turned out to be pretty insightful. Hoopdance Fitness is not something for beginning hoopers. It's very much a lot of very technical and precise drills of moving the hoop up and down your body. Not only did Jamie from Hoopnautica have incredible control and precision, she seemed to do it all without much of a sweat. After 25 minutes of this type of hooping, the rest of the group was pretty spent. I didn't originally have any interest in the fitness genre of hooping, but I can see the value of having that precision of control of the hoop that could make it a lot easier to into flow states for mindful hooping.

Satise & Natasha: Hoop Performance & Choreography Workshop

Photo by Philo Hagen

Photo by Philo Hagen

There were four sessions in the afternoon, and we could only go to three of them, and this was the one that I skipped. It probably would have been insightful, but I don't really have much desire to perform at all. The only thing I heard about it was that it seemed more geared towards female performance then male performance anyway.

Acro Yoga by Nayeli

Photo by Kara Spencer
Nayeli is a hooper and a long-time yoga practitioner who taught a session on Acro Yoga during the afternoon break. I had attempted to provide a base for someone, but my hamstrings were way to tight to get into the proper angle. Nayeli was kind enough to still give me a "flying" experience, and it was totally surreal. It may not look like it from the pictures, but I felt both totally secure and like I was floating in space while someone was doing thai message / yoga-like stretches on me while I was hanging upside down.

If you ever get a chance to experience that from an experienced Acro Yoga base, then I'd highly recommend it.

Hooping Life Documentary Preview

Over dinner, the filmmakers from the The Hooping Life came to show the first 10 minutes of their documentary on Hoop Dance to the Hoop Camp hoopers. Most of the people who are featured in the film were sitting in the room, and so there was a lot of hooting and hollering whenever someone first appeared on screen. They wanted to share a part of the hooping culture from the streets of the inner city that most hoopers never seen, and the film looked pretty well edited with some additional stylized flare.

They're estimating a release sometime in early 2010, and they said that everything is finished except for the music -- which turns out is quite an important part of a film like this. They said that they've been in talks with Paul Oakenfold to score the film, and they thought that it was leaning that way without giving a definite confirmation. The ultimate distribution channel seems still up in the air, but all of the Hoop Camp hoopers were totally excited to see it and demanded to see more of a preview, and so they showed the following additional footage:

Opening Fire Ceremony

Photo by Natasha Young

Shakti, Julia and Spiral read a ceremonial poem about the deeper meaning of the fire element, and then went on to teach an advanced workshop on fire hooping with two hoops. It was pretty amazing to watch the seasoned fire hoopers of Michelle, Spiral, Julia, Shakti, Rich, Grant, and Unity do their thing with two fire hoops. Spiral in particular had a pretty mesmerizing presence in how she would pierce into the audience's eyes while fire hooping. Tammy Firefly was also notable in her intense fire poi spinning.

I got some impromptu training on fire safety, and was responsible for putting out any fabric fires if anything went horribly wrong.

Kamala and Hannah of FireGroove: Fire Hooping Basics

Photo by Philo Hagen

One of the most heart-warming things to watch was people fire hooping for the first time. You could feel their fear and tension, and watch it melt as they started to relax and have something something like a profound mystical experience. There was a whole pair bonding and sense of ritualistic rite of passage that was really unique to see how Kamala and Hannah of FireGroove held the space for this to happen.

Photo by Philo Hagen

It was earlier in the night that I had seen fire hooping in person for the first time, and I can say that it's a lot different than watching videos of it -- especially as people are going through their virgin burns. Seeing some of the expressions on people's faces and exhilaration afterwards was definitely one of the highlights from the weekend.

Annie: T-Shirt Reconstruction

Photo by Philo Hagen

The idea of a custom-making night-time workshop by Annie of AnnieLand.net didn't sound that appealing to me, but it was cool to see the end result of how they cut a pattern into the back of a T-Shirt. It seemed like the people who went to it had a lot of fun, and were excited to have some methods for spicing up some old clothes.

Merlin: LED Hoop Jam

Photo by Kara Spencer

The Midnight Psi Playshop in the Redwood forest was absolutely magical. Merlin of PsiHoops loaned out over 40 of his LED hoops that he makes custom clear tubing for. We went into the forest and did a number of interactive games with turning the LEDS off and on and I'm sure that there's going to be a lot more amazing photos and videos that words can't describe.

Photo by Natasha Young

Then after the group exercises that we did in Redwood forest, we went into the open area for a totally massive LED hoop jam. I had trouble putting the LED hoops down that night and stayed up way later than I had intended and ended up skipping out on one of the early sessions the next day.

Rich: Diagrammatic Motion with Isopops & Isobreaks

Photo by Philo Hagen

Rich Porter did a reprise of his Diagrammatic motion workshop that he gave at the Flow Gathering, with a couple of new insights that he said were pretty mind-blowing. Rich described what is called Continuous Assembly Patterns in Poi (aka CAPs), which are essentially breaks -- not in the direction of hoop rotation, but alternating between spin and counter-spin by changing the direction of the hand. It's actually a pretty simple 180-degree motion that the your straight goes through pointing down from your waist to pointing up at your head, but it's timed so that it creates a mind-boggling appearance of the shifting between spin and counter spin.

Rich has incorporated CAPs into all different positions of rotation in combination with slides, isopops and isobreaks in such a fluid way that many people ended up taking his class twice trying to really grok it. I imagine that the Hoop Technique DVD that he's working will go over all of this in great detail. Rich also said that some of the next frontier of this work is in plane breaks, and especially with some of the stuff that Brecken has been doing.

Rich's Isopops have had a huge impact on my style of hooping, and I had independently found the 360-degree CAPs move with my micro mini hoops, but the 180-degree version is definitely much more flashy. One thing that Rich pays a lot of attention to is creating high-contrast motion and being very aware of how it looks in a performance context. I tend to be more concerned with how it feels, and so there are some variations that I do like isobreak hooping with minis on horizontal plane in front of my body and not always crossing my hands over when doing isobreaks to the side.

But Rich's workshop was definitely mindblowing for a lot of people, which it was for too me in Bend, but this time around it was mostly review with some good reminders and new grist that made it totally worth attending again.

Sandra "SaFire": Creating Unconventional Body Structures

Photo by Kara Spencer

SaFire's session of creating unconventional body flows was my favorite, outer-focused workshop. SaFire has a teaching background and it really shows in her passion of sharing knowledge whenever and wherever she goes. She's never too busy to stop what she's doing to help someone out. But as a group facilitator, she really shined.

SaFire was able to pack together a lot of fun and innovative exercises that were designed to give us constraints and stop our habitual flow patterns to help find new paths of creativity. We jumped hop scotch and even did a multi-tasking exercise by playing patty cake with a partner.

Photo by Philo Hagen

She also had some really interesting exercises with hooping according to either a Lemon (close-to-body) Lion (expansive-from-body) Hare (fast) or Turtle (slow). At the end of the session, we hoop danced in the erratic style of the famous Evolution of Dance video. All in all, it was a ton of fun and it felt like everyone regardless of skill level was getting something out of the exercises. I'll be sure to post a link to her agenda when she posts it since it's definitely worth checking out. UPDATE Here's SaFire's class outline with tracklist and lots of notes.

Miss Rosie: Fancy Footwork

Photo by Philo Hagen

Miss Rosie's footwork sessiosn was the early morning workshop that I skipped out on due to excessive LED hooping the night before. It looked like a good overview of different hoop dance techniques, but I certainly didn't have much energy for any fancy footwork.

Kara Spencer: Dancing the Mandala

Photo by Philo Hagen

For me Kara Spencer's Dancing the Mandala session was the most spiritually profound and powerful. Kara is like the spiritual hooping philosopher who is able to bridge the symbolic gap between cutting edge physics and the inner experience of hoop dance.

There is something sacred to the circle that just almost every indigenous culture discovered at one time or another from the sacred Native American Hoop Dance to the Sacred Circle Dances around the world. And Kara is an experienced healing arts practitioner who has dedicated a lot of time in trying to connect the insights of these traditions back into Hoop Dance.

After leading us in a circular breathing exercise, Kara shared the insights of Nassim Haramein's Unified Field theory, which he proposes that the shape of the universe is toroidal, much like the shape of a hula hoop. Nassim also puts "spin" at a critical-level of importance in the nature of the universe and ourselves. This importance of spin seems to be connected to why the whirling dervishes are able able to so easily access the divine through sustained spinning.

Kara also talked about the Heart Math Institute research into the strong electromagnetic field that the heart emits, which also happens to be a toroid. And she's also been providing active feedback to Sacred Geometry researcher named Cory Herter from her own experiences of using his flower of life inspired designs on her Mandala Hoops that she personally uses and also custom-makes for people.

Kara had a series of guided meditation exercises including an incredible hooping chakra meditation and Hoop Yoga that led into some really awesome flow states for me.

Kara was throwing out a lot of esoteric references that probably went over a lot of people's heads by the end of the week, but I was totally resonating with it and grateful to find someone else on such a similar path of inquiry.

Christabel: Connecting to Spirit

Photo by Philo Hagen

The final hooping workshop was put on by HoopGirl herself, Christabel Zamor. She led us through some really interesting guided meditations where we imitated the earth and wind elements, and then moved into some more technically difficult exercises like hooping with a cup on our head or trying to hoop on our shoulders while passing a balloon from hand to hand. In the end it was a nice series of guided intentions to round out the day.

Final Hoop Jam

Photo by Philo Hagen
The final closing circle was just a hoop jam. The majority of people were either totally spent, or had already started to pack up and head out early. I managed to find some energy for a couple of dances, but called it quits soon after that and said my goodbyes before the final hoop jam later closer to the ocean.

Conclusion

It was an awesome and inspiring weekend, and there are so many other notable hoopers and hooping styles there. I certainly have a lot to chew on for a while, and look forward to the continued expansion of the community over the next year to individuals who can integrate their own cultures, experiences and archetypical flavor into Hoop Dance.

And one final note. This post was inspired by Baxter's write-up from Hoop Camp 2008, which I read over and over to get a glimpse of what it would've been like to go to hoop camp.

UPDATE: And PS: If you're also interested in mindful hooping, then I'd like to start posting more videos at some point so the best way to keep in touch is probably via subscribing to my YouTube and messaging there.

UPDATE: I'll add in some other videos down below as they come in.
This one is from Sandra "SaFire" Sommerville:

UPDATE: Here's another Hoop Camp video from Carla Barnett Snow http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=171195630271