December, 2009:

Kent Bye recently made a presentation at Ignite Portland to 600 people about the resurgence of hooping.

I gave this presentation in front of 600 people at Ignite Portland in the Bagdad Theater on November 19th. Ignite presentations are 20 slides and 5 minutes long with the slides automatically advancing every 15 seconds, and I decided to do one about the Resurgence of Hula Hooping — while hooping.

I talk a bit about the performance branch and meditative branch of hooping, and since I tend to lean more towards the meditative branch, then a lot of my focus was on my experiences and ideas on the more spiritual aspects of hooping.

It was also my first public ‘performance’ per se, and I had a lot of feedback from people that they were inspired to take up hooping and explore some of the more spiritual aspects that they weren’t even aware of.

There is certainly a lot more stuff that I could have talked about, but the Ignite constraints really get you to focus down on the essential big ideas.

This is how I pitched the presentation before I had even created it: “For the past year, I’ve immersed myself into the resurgence of Hula Hooping as a modern dance form and spiritual practice. I’ll give an overview of the evolving landscape of Hoop Dance from the branches of fitness, spirituality, and performance. I’ll give a few beginner tips, and show some photos of how people make their customized, adult-sized hoops. I’ll talk about some of the therapeutic and healing benefits that people have experienced from hooping, and how people are fusing together insights from ancient wisdom traditions to make hooping something much more of a fad. I’ll talk about the Hoop community, their national gatherings and the different extremes of what people are doing with the hoop. You might also see me demonstrate some hooping throughout the entire talk.”

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