As we celebrate the Thanksgiving Day in USA today I would like to share a recent experience I had, watching Native American dancers perform the Native Hoop Dance at the Intermountain Hoop Dance Competition this Fall at the Red Butte Garden Amphitheater. In Native American Culture, “The hoop is symbolic of ”the never-ending circle of life.” It has no beginning and no end. The hoop is also considered as a symbol of connection between the past, present and future.
The hoop, considered sacred, often as the medicine-wheel, has been used by Native American tribes for generations in healing ceremonies. Hoop Dance is a form of story telling and performed by a single dancer, where they dance to the rhythmic beats of the drum, with their feet and body spinning, twirling and throwing the hoops around their bodies creating patterns as they move through space and time. Each tribe has a unique signature of the movements and regalia, passed through generations by the elders. The hoops are usually made of reeds or wood, and dancers often depict patterns meaningful to their tribe, viz., eagles, butterflies, fish, snake, turtles.
It was my first time watching this dance form performed live with Native American drummers and musicians accompanying the dancer on stage. Participants were from many different tribes in the Mountain-West, spanning across British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. On that crisp Fall (Autumn) day, the Amphitheater grounds were filled with a mesmerized audience watching each dancer go through the hoops depicting their unique style and story. The reverberating sound of the drums and the accompanied vocalization of the singers still resonates in my head.
In the collage-image at the top, titled “Connection” are some of the movements I captured of the competing dancers. Many of these young women and men, not only enthralled the audience with their swift and captivating movements and story telling through their dance, they also shared shared their personal motivation of keeping their traditions alive, as they were pursuing their education and careers, as doctors, engineers, therapists, teachers to name a few.
The pencil sketch in the center was a drawing I made one afternoon, as I was trying out my new pencil set. Often, I start with a blank canvas or a blank paper with no particular agenda for what I want to sketch, and my hand move on the paper, making strokes one at a time, and maneuver along until I turn it to something I like. I started with an oblong circle, and added more interconnected oblong circles and one point was trying to make multiple interconnected loops, figuring how many loops each node connects to. This drawing was a spontaneous experiment in my doodling, but after watching the hoop-dance a little over an year after I made this sketch, something seemed to resonate. In addition to the mesmerizing performance of an incredibly complex dance form, the philosophy of a ‘never-ending circle of life’, of repeating cycles in nature and the connections in our lives with nature and community we live in, truly resonated.
The second image has more photos of the dancers from that Intermountain Hoop Dance Competition and once again like a repeating theme, I found another sketch of mine from around the same time as the first sketch with interconnected loops. This recurring theme in my own art, reflects in my motivation to share my interests in science and art, which are inter-twinned in my life.
An interesting mathematical perspective on the size ad dimensions of the hoops, and in the context of Venn diagrams is given by a Native American hoop dancer and retired Math teacher Terry Goedel. Here are two podcast links that are interesting & informative. (https://azpbs.org/artin48podcast/2022/05/art-in-48-hoop-dance/, https://advancingartsleadership.com/mathematics_and_the_hoop_dance)
Looking back and reminiscing on this Thanksgiving day, I am grateful for all the people who’ve come through the overlapping connected loops in my life and those who’re still centered in the Venn diagram.
Happy Thanksgiving.