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it’s not so often that I master a move these days– I haven’t been working at “moves” so much as just re-connecting to my hoop …and to what the spirit moves me to do inside of it, if you will.
But just now while I was leg-hooping (doing spunk, in the HoopGirl vocabulary, for all you lovely Readers and Owners and Buyers of the Book) I dropped my hoop onto the floor and managed to give it a kick with one foot and then knocked it higher with the other and got it going around my hips again, without it ever coming to a stop (whatever that’s called, a live kick start?)– which is a freaking FIRST for me, ladies and gentlemen. And I had one of those luscious experiences of mastery-satisfaction that are far and few between. (You know whereof I speak? You want to share your last luscious mastery moment?)
Just one more thing to celebrate, really.
practicing several of the moves Brecken taught 8/24-25/09: swinging the hoop into an isolation behind you with the 180 body turn (2x, bookending the clip at beginning & end); the finger “flair” on the isolations (which I seem to need to stick my tongue out for); “bouncing” the hoop while isolating.
At the beginning of July I went on an 8-day writing retreat to finish the current book project (or come close to finishing it). I brought my regular hoop (32” diameter, 100 psi, 1” tube diameter) just so I could take some hooping breaks to clear my head. I knew there’d be other folks at the property but I figured I wouldn’t be giving lessons, so I didn’t bring a beginner’s hoop. Duh. Of course I wound up giving lessons, to at least 6 adults and 6 kids. And the adults struggled more than they should have, using mine, while I demonstrated using a kid-size hoop that I found up there.
These people were so warm and generous, and enthusiastic about hooping (despite the frustration of learning with a smallish, lightish one) that I resolved to make a bunch of hoops to gift to their community.
It’s been a long time since I made hoops, so I spent a day snuffling around on hooping.org, reading the discussion threads in the hoopmaking section and re-reading the tutorial by Jason, aka the Father of Hoopmaking.
Logistics: I am a city mouse who lives a car-free existence. I do have a membership with the car-sharing service Zipcar, so it occurred to me to rent a car to pick up supplies. But by the time I figured in the likely minimum of $40 I’d spend on the Zipcar, plus the possible frustration of running to Loewe’s or Home Depot only to find they didn’t have what I needed, I decided I would just order materials online and have them delivered to my doorstep in downtown Oakland. Fellow City Mice, and Country Mice: I can heartily recommend this option. (Tip: Bulk up orders by combining your order with friends’, in order to get the lowest carbon footprint.)
Someone had posted a couple helpful links for online tubing on hooping.org. I ended up going with the 100’ coil of 1” diameter, 125 PSI tubing from Ideal True Value hardware. It cost $34.99 plus shipping, which was about ten bucks on top of that. This would turn out to be enough for 10 beginner hoops, in varying diameters at about an average of 37″.
(A note for newbies: the PSI refers to the thickness of the wall of the tube. That’s important for the water pressure for which this irrigation/plumbing tubing is actually intended. The higher the PSI number, the heavier the hoop will be. 100 is a little light for the ideal beginner’s hoop, in my mind, although you can just use an extra layer of tape later to add weight. 160psi is very solid. But 125 is right in the middle, and seemed perfect.)
I got the ¾” insert connectors online as well. They cost $0.59 each, and I ordered seven, thinking I’d only have enough tubing for 6 or 7 hoops (oops). With shipping they came to just over eight bucks.
Then, for the most whimsical part of the material acquisitions, I took a virtual trip to identi-tape.com. The motherlode of hoop tapes. They have actually responded to the hoop community’s patronage by featuring all hoop-appropriate tapes in a list of links, AND they’ve adapted the length of the rolls to easier finish multiple hoops (which, of course, depends on how much tape you use per hoop…but there is nothing more frustrating than running out of tape before finishing a hoop.)
I still had a nice selection of vinyl tape and gaffers (the fabric tape that allows the hoop to “stick” to your body better) leftover from my last hoopmaking orgy several years back. But since then I’ve become more aware of toxic chemicals and materials and Stuff. That vinyl tape in all the shiny colors that we all love so much? Uh-oh. Vinyl means PVC.
And here’s what PVC means:
During PVC’s multi-stage production, chlorine gas is used to produce ethylene dichloride (EDC), which is converted into vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), which is converted into the PVC. This is a horrifically poisonous list of ingredients: Chlorine gas is so toxic that it has been used in war; EDC is extremely hazardous; and VCM is a known human carcinogen that causes a rare form of liver cancer and also damages the central nervous system. Many studies have documented high rates of diseases among workers in vinyl chloride production facilities, including liver cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, lymphomas, leukemia, and liver cirrhosis.
PVC’s production process also releases a lot of toxic pollution into the environment, including dioxins. Dioxins are a group of noxious toxic chemicals that persist in the environment, travel great distances, build up in the food chain, and then cause cancer, as well as harm to the immune and reproductive systems.
Additionally, because its pure form PVC is actually a brittle plastic with limited use, further chemicals, or additives, needed to be mixed in to make it pliable and expand its uses. These include neurotoxic heavy metals like mercury and lead, and synthetic chemicals, like phthalates, which are known to cause reproductive disorders and suspected to cause cancer. Since most of these additives don’t actually bond to the PVC at the molecular level, they slowly leak out, a process called leaching or off-gassing, into our environment and our bodies.
Sorry to be all Debbie Downer on your ass. But isn’t it better to be an informed consumer?
So this time before ordering anything I checked out identi-tape’s page of information on their RoHS compliant tapes. RoHS means Restriction of Hazardous Substances, like lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, and VOC solvents. After reading all about it, I wound up ordering a couple rolls of fabric/ gaffers tapes, 2 rolls of glitter tape. The only vinyl-like tape I ordered was two rolls of the RoHS-compliant harness tape, which also meets the even-stricter child-focused CPSIA standards. It’s not perfect but it’s a sight better, and the more we express our preference for safer tapes, the more they will make and offer safer tapes. 
The final thing I needed was a ratcheting pipecutter. I know enough hoopers and hoopmakers that I figured I could borrow one from friends, which I did (thanks Rich!). You can also use a handsaw or some tough garden shears, but I recommend getting a proper cutter for safe, even, clean cuts.
Now I just needed to sit back and wait for the stuff to arrive at my door.
I am a stressbunny with work right now! Here’s me blowing off steam at the mid-point of a 14-hour day…! xxHG
Writing a how-to book is harder than it looks.
Before starting in on HOOPING!, I skimmed a bunch of books on stretching, bellydance, yoga, NIA (one of my faves), Swiss ball exercises, punk rock aerobics (very fun), and striptease workouts. One thing that differentiates hooping from all but one of these movement forms is that it involves object manipulation. And although the ball is an object, it’s the same from every angle, and there are a limited amount of ways your body can interact with it.
The hoop, meanwhile, exists on multiple planes (perpendicular and parallel to the ground, for instance) and levels (at the height of your shins, or above your head). You can grip it from the outside and the inside, with your hand and wrist twisting to every conceivable angle; it can be maneuvered with your torso, shoulders, elbows, neck, feet, knees, thighs, and bum as well. The possibilities are almost limitless.
I was a pretty ideal writer to partner with Christabel because I’d taken nearly every class HoopGirl had offered at the point when we started on the book, and I’d mastered every move we decided to cover in its pages. I already knew the vocabulary: one of HoopGirl’s trademarks is her sassy names for moves. She calls hooping around your waist, for example, “Pump,” and around your legs,“Spunk.” While this is the object of derision among some folks in the hooping community, I’ve always thought it was fun, and a smart business decision. In fact, I’ve had a hand in naming a number of HoopGirl moves, like “Dolphin” and “Pearl.”
So our raw materials at the outset of the project were Christabel’s years of teaching and explaining moves to students, combined with my experience of HoopGirl (and, um, writerly prowess), plus her HoopGirl teacher manuals. Sounds like we had an ample head-start, don’t it?
Being able to explain to students how to move the hoop and their bodies to achieve a desired effect is a gift, as you’ll know if you ever tried to explain a move, especially a more complicated one, to someone else. Christabel definitely has that gift. Even so, translating her explanations to the page was complicated.
Phrases like “bring the hoop down over your head” may make perfect sense when your teacher is simultaneously demonstrating it a few feet away, but for the lone reader squinting over the page in her living room, even with the help of a photo, it just wasn’t going to fly. At first we erred on the side of excruciating levels of detail (“your palm will be facing the floor, thumb on the outside of the hoop, as you keep the hoop parallel to the ground and swing it through the air”) and multiple visual images (“imagine the hoop as ascending a spiral staircase, or a waiter brandishing a plate from behind his back with a flourish”), but ultimately the text had to be pared down to the simplest, most evocative language.
Too much explanatory verbiage on the page, and the reader runs screaming, fearing they’ll never ever be able to master this. Worse yet, it’ll mean the book gets left in the bookstore and never brought home at all.
As a righty hooper (meaning, my hoop naturally rotates to my right; we righties seem to be the equivalent of lefties in the regular, non-hooping world, based on my casual observation, with one or two righties generally present in every class or group of 15-20 hoopers), I felt strongly that the instructions should be worded in such a way to enable hoopers of both persuasions to understand without needing to reverse everything in their heads. That led to a lot of sentences that had Ruth, our editor, cringing, such as “Use the hand opposite the direction the hoop is traveling around your body.” We spent long hours trying to make those phrases as simple and elegant as possible, and I think and hope we mostly succeeded.
…
(More on the Making of HOOPING! to come)
The long-anticipated book– the world’s first English-language book on contemporary hoopdance (Japanese hipster-hoopers released one not long ago) — is on its way!!!! The stork will be dropping it into bookstores in 2-3 month’s time. Stay tuned.
NB-This isn’t quite the final cover: notably, the final agreement between myself and my co-author will place my name under hers, to be preceded by a “with,” and thus identify my role as more writerly and less hoop-guruly.
