Hello. My name's Brecken, I live in Baltimore and... what can i say?, I'm really into hooping. I've been pretty obsessed with it, actually, for the past few years and I'm excited to move onto that next stage of exchange in teaching and collaborating and learning from tons of other hoopers. Now that I get to meet all of you, I'll have a better idea of what that brings and hopefully a bunch of new friends to play with. And I'm dying to hear some of your eccentric hoop-ideas that I'm sure most of us share, whether it's hoop- painting, music making, break dancing. Basket weaving. Whatever. I say we write an opera.

Otherwise, about me: I have a background in art and soccer, some theatre, but not much dance or yoga.  So I'm just now working to learn more about bodily mechanics to better refine my movements and avoid breaking my neck. I've been thinking lately about how that "click" you get --or "flow," I guess-- can be transferred into other art forms and I'm wondering how to go about maintaining it--whether that means moving on to a different medium or returning to an old one or getting over the hurdle and moving on. With hooping, specifically, I've been concentrating on the separation of new tricks and performance. Can they mesh seamlessly? ...Probably. What I love about the hooping community is that we all know how fast it's growing and that whatever we initiate will be built upon and far surpassed in no time. So our creativity is helplessly pooled into a larger evolution than any of our own and we can count on being wowed for a long time. I'm still excited about it. See you in June and happy hooping.

How many times have you been asked how to go from horizontal to vertical (or vice versa)?  It may seem outdated for some of us, but given the infinite scope of planes available, we may have all just about glossed over that middle space of opportunity. So in stepping back a bit, to that time old dichotomy of leading and following-- that is, our input vs. the hoop’s momentum-- we can separate the two to better explore the full range of planar possibilities and subsequently create a broader road map of helpful transitions. Sometimes we have to give the hoop its space. I’ve found that it’s usually on its way to a usable plane and it’s best sometimes to ride it out and then sharply claim it when it gets there. Or softly claim it. Either way.

So in this workshop I’d like to explore that looser middle area, and share a few of my favorite techniques for accenting on the planes that we are familiar with. Together they make quite the buffet for pace change.