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Samhain: the day when the veil between the world of the living and the non-living is at its thinnest.Hence our celebration of All Hallow’s Eve. Last year on Samhain I danced in the Spiral Dance, invoking West, the direction of Water, with 2 other gorgeous dancers.
I missed the ritual this year, but was delighted to receive a bunch of photos from last year’s photographer, Richard Man.
All Hallow’s Eve, and Autumn in general: a time to step out of your self and into costume and, more importantly, into empathy/relationship with others — alive, dead, unborn…
the 100 strangers shot (the "mermaid"!)
For days now I’ve been mulling over what to say about Brecken’s 2-day workshop that took place in SF this past Monday & Tuesday. Last night I was telling a non-hooping friend about how indescribable it was, and in doing so I came up with the best term yet: “liminal.”
Here’s what wiki has by way of a definition:
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical state of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology (a “liminal state”) and in anthropological theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.
The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed – a situation which can lead to new perspectives.
Really, the word does a pretty outstanding job of describing both Brecken‘s style AND my experience of the workshop.
Brecken has a totally unique thing going on with her hoop: on the threshold between wobbly/sloppy/ drunken on the one hand, and precise/controlled/quick on the other. And surfing between planes nearly continuously. She stays relatively grounded, maybe bouncing a little on the balls of her feet, and then executes these crazy sideways/diagonal leaps where her body arcs through the air and mimics the curve of the hoop. (My core was *so* sore after Day One from twisting around in efforts to mimic that.) I should add “genderbending” to the title here too: her dance is simultaneously “masculine” (with strong pops reminiscent of Kahunahula & Rich) and incredibly “feminine,” the way she arches her spine or lets her hands waft through the air while doing angled rolls. She moves with total confidence once she’s connected with her hoop, yet she’s all shy and self-deprecating outside it, the most humble top-hooper, hands down.
And the workshop, being her second ever, felt like a birth of a new creature. Her explanations of her hooping motivations, inspirations, experiences took us down long windy undertravelled paths, wild green tendrils and jungle sometimes obscuring the way, until we’d arrive at some mountainside spring-fed pool of clarity. Sometimes I lost the thread entirely, but sometimes I made it there, to that remote gem.
Yeah, it felt like a rite of passage, for sure. I felt incredibly lucky to be there, surrounded by so much hooping talent, and learning from this capricious creature. Here she is (I watched this soundtrackless wonder, which really takes *off* around 2:30, with Cheb i Sabbah’s Jai Bhavani) :
My hooping playlist gets renewed every half year or so and is currently twelve hours of eclectic: Amadou&Mariam, Balkan Beat Box, Basement Jaxx, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, K’naan, MIA, Moloko, Thievery Corp, and assorted others (ok, Shaggy’s in there—I cop to it)… but I realized last week that I’ve been really limiting my freedom of expression with it.
Back in the day, at Allstars rehearsals, Christabel would talk about challenging ourselves to hoop to wildly different music to inspire different gestures and combinations. Once or twice, for the performance jam at the end of rehearsal, she’d pop in a CD that drove her point home. I remember Natasha getting some operatic number—I mean literally from an opera. She did well with it, incorporating her years of ballet training. The next song was, like, Frank Sinatra. And after that, maybe Tibetan chanting or something. When Christabel wasn’t there to enforce it, though, we stuck to our own favorites, on rotation.
I spent last week in heaven—living close to the land and in tight community on a gorgeous property known as Black Mountain in the Russian River area just an hour’s drive north of SF/Oakland. And among the many amazing folks up there, several talented musicians. One of them played classical guitar—think Andres Segovia—haunting Spanish riffs like my favorite heartrender Recuerdos de la Alhambra; some Bach, Schubert, very old traditional pieces like Greensleeves; things that sounded familiar but that I could never name… and I was invited (challenged… called….) to hoop to them.
So I hooped to Bach and I hooped to Greensleeves and to Andalusian melodies. And I think I had some real Moments out there… Some supercharmed Flow. It felt like I did, at least. (For better or for worse, none of it was captured, except in the minds’ eyes of folks who happened to be watching or passing by…) In fact, my hooping felt like it had a life of its own, almost separate from me, and I was just the conduit. It was phenomenal.
Just one more reminder that nature thrives with diversity, and is stifled by homogeneity…
From TheRumpus.net, an interview by Julie Greicius
Rumpus: Right! The book. Let’s talk about this book. You and this mortal HoopGirl have written a guidebook to sex.
Conrad: Actually, it’s a guide to hooping, the modern form of hula hooping.
Conrad: Right, in order to keep the hoop in orbit around your waist.
From my girlfriend Julie, who is flying back east this morning because of a family emergency:
“About to board, hula hoop stashed in my bag like a great tube of prozac, like a little personal fence I can put up when ever the crazies get too, well, crazy.”
Yesterday being Father’s Day, I spent a couple extra moments talking to the photograph of my dad on my altar. In the photograph, which was taken around 1942 on O’ahu, near Pearl Harbor, he looks serene, bemused, and as though he’d rather be someplace else. That was, apparently, his general take on his time in the Navy during WWII—a subject about which it was hard to get him to talk, when I was old enough to be asking, some 40 years later. He disliked the whole fighting/killing bit (which he avoided by being a radio controller, on the island and for short stints at sea), and would rather have been…
…dancing. Because my dad, David Matthew Conrad (1922-1996), was a champion jitterbug. Get OUT!, right? But it’s true. When he was in his late teens and his twenties, my dad was cutting loose with the hot wild acrobatic jive of the day, swinging the girls upside down, kicking and flapping to the sounds of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, and winning prizes for it. Newspaper accounts of the time used words like frenzy, pandemonium, and ecstasy to describe the jitterbug phenomenon. One psychologist warned of the “dangerously hypnotic influence…(music) cunningly devised to a tempo faster than 72 bars to the minute – faster than the human pulse.”
Thinking about that, about him, something clicked. Just the other day I was talking to Philo about how long it’s taken for me to shake off homogenizing influences of the hoopworld’s hegemony, how I still don’t really know what my own style is any more. He suggested I look back to old videos. I’ve looked, I said. I’m just chaotic, and goofy: I switch planes (from horizontal to vertical to diagonals) really fast and almost continuously… and it’s no fun to watch because it’s so jarring and jagged….
Who told you it’s no fun to watch?, he demanded, getting huffy. How I love Philo.
And so yesterday, on Father’s Day, I met up with the Bay Area Hoopers in Dolores Park, and I just abandoned myself. I flipped and swung and flapped and did crazy happy high steps; I stopped caring about elegance or flow or eye contact with any “audience.” I swayed and swerved and drooped and hopped. And I was thinking, you know, if my dad—the jitterbug dancer, radio crooner, sometimes painter, and closet writer, all those artistic personas beating like a heart under his three-piece suits on his way to work in contract law all those years he Provided for me and my mom— if my dad could see me today—me this crazy hooper, professional writer—oh, he’d be so happy, and so proud.
(See Part I, Part II, and Part III here.)
You’re probably wondering what this image of Richard Simmons is doing here. He’s here because he’s what popped into my mind every time I came across the word buns in the manuscript of the HOOPING book.
Buns, you see, is HoopGirl’s preferred word for the rear end. Well, after booty, but booty’s one of those words you have to use sparingly. For moves like BOOTY BLITZ or BOOTY BUMP, there’s no using booty in the step-by-step instructions. See how overwhelming it gets to have booty six times in a single paragraph? Booty! (Seven.)
Myself, I’m partial to the word ass, rhyming as it does with sass and slithering sexily off the tongue. Butt we both knew that asses (or their british cousins, arses) would never fly with our publisher. Then there’s rump, of which I’m also a fan(ny), but it’s just not right for a fitness book. And bum: too British, with that confusing other meaning in American. Bottom: clearly too infantile. Cheeks, trunk, backside, posterior, badonkadonk : none quite appropriate. So, with all the juicy ones benched, that left your standard collection: rear, behind, butt, and buttocks. All of which, even the last, I prefer to buns by a wide-ass margin.
So I’d send a draft of a chapter to Christabel and she’d send it back, and the butts and rears had been transformed into buns, buns and more buns. Richard Simmons, Richard Simmons, and more Richard Simmons! In bright blue spandex, he was, each time, there in my head. I shuddered, replaced the buns with behinds and buttocks.
And so it went, back and forth, the battle of the backsides, with Cbel claiming buns was cute and sexy. And me feeling as uncomfortable as if Richard Simmons was down on bended knee proposing to me each time she spoke the odious thing.
Finally we more or less agreed to divide the sum of all instances between us, and she used her buns in her half, and I peppered my half with my rear and behind and butt. Because that’s how collaboration goes.
And now that it’s all said and done, do I still shudder and picture Richard Simmons each time I see buns in the book? You can bet your bottom dollar on it.
Richard showing off his buns
Countdown, takeoff, wheeeee! I haven’t come down yet, and the book (and Christabel) will be flying for some time yet…
What a gorgeous night we had at the ever-so-festive Make-Out Room in San Francisco’s Mission district to celebrate the birth of our baby. I kept on whirling around to see yet another body I had to run and wrap my arms around!
From half a lifetime ago, representing my high school days, there was Cruz DeWilde, a mad genius who spends his spare time questioning whether the prevailing model of gravity is, in fact, correct. What better place to contemplate gravity than from within a hoop? He got a special copy of the book that was not only signed but kissed by yours truly, to make up for that time some 20 years back when I was too much the awkward nerdgirl to get to it in the passenger seat of his car.
Then there was the crew of writers from the San Francisco Writers Grotto (where a chunk of the book was written, and where guinea pigs Marianna and Helena tested drafts of the step-by-step instructions for complex moves). There was the superheroic hottie former firefighter turned novelist, Caroline Paul, who is thanked under my Acknowledgements in the book. That’s because when I was at my wit’s end with how to resolve any one of the many crises that arose during the writing, Caroline could be relied upon to provide steady, calm, logical advice. This is a woman who’s good in a crisis. She had John M and Steve M in tow, too, and the latter bought a book for his cute wife Denise cuz he’s hoping she’ll do some gyratin in this Jose Cuervo bikini he got her a while back. Other notable Grotto-ites in attendance were the pretty frackin phenomenal writer Peter Orner, and kindred spirit Chris Colin with his wife Amy Standen. Don’t worry: the two of them left their infant safely in the trunk of the car just so they could come check out the hoopenings without that nagging worry.
My bestest girl Antonella was there, of course. I didn’t get to tell this story in the book, but alongside everything else that hooping brought into my life, it brought me Antonella. We met at my very first HoopGirl hoop class back in August 2006. (If I’m not mistaken that was also Miss Rosie’s first. I remember her tiny dog Romie(?) shivering in the corner, watching the hoops fly.) And it was Antonella who insisted we check out the Bay Area Hoopers, and, once we were there, dragged my butt out of the bushes and into my hoop when I was too shy and overwhelmed by all the hooptalent to do anything but wide-eyed watching. My Antonella. She was there with her husband Roi, who happens to be the talented photographer who shot these back in March.
My worldchanging/sustainability peeps were also in da house: shiny-spirited Erica from the mighty mighty Free Range Studios (creators of The Meatrix and The Story of Stuff) and Quentin who’s supporting folks in the Tenderloin and Deborah who asks Should You Really Be A Lawyer and the remarkable Chid Liberty with the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project and the powerhouse Matt Lewis, whose feet you’ve gotta kiss for keeping the planet from melting.
And then there were the hoopers. Gobs of gorgeous hoopers: Annie, Claudia, Satise, the breathtaking Rich, Michael (whom I also Acknowledged on account of his generous loving and patient ways as one of my most influential hoopguides), Khan, Victor, Rosie, Heather, Jennaluna and Jenny, Corinne, Paige… so many I must be forgiven if I’ve left any off the list. See some stills of the hoopers here.
I think there were between 60 and 70 people who came out, all told, although by the midway point I’d consumed enough champagne that counting got hard … (Thanks to Obid, my friend Sue’s companion, who kept handing me those cute single-serving bottles of the stuff all night, and which by the end I was chugging beer-style, no glass required. Thank goodness my momma was tucked away in Berlin and couldn’t see her daughter commit such an abomination.) The bubbly made my second hooperformance especially exciting, as the hoop went flying out into the audience and towards the bar. Again and again. But everyone just cheered. Oh, joyous shining hooping community, I’ve missed you, while I’ve been off writing about you….
