When Dallas Chief Eagle and his daughter Jasmine Pickner join forces with Rhythm in Shoes March 5-6, Cityfolk will be hosting two World Champion hoop dancers. Hoop dancing is an ancient artistic tradition common to many tribes that has gained a new lease on life through the recent proliferation of dance competitions and regional pow-wows. Here’s a bit of information on the tradition to whet your curiosity. There are several great videos of hoop dancers online, as well as numerous resources for those looking to go deeper.
Nobody really knows when and where hoop dancing originated, but some scholars feel that the people of Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico were the first to do a dance in which the dancer moved through a hoop. Wherever it started, hoop dancing spread widely among Native Americans in the United States and the First Nations of Canada and has a central symbolic place and importance to Native people of many different tribes.
The hoop represents the circle of life, which has no beginning or end, as well as the endless cycles of day and night and summer and winter. In some tribes, hoop dances have a healing role to restore balance and harmony to the world; these dances are generally not performed outside of healing ceremonies or for outsiders. Those kinds of hoop dances that are performed or featured in competitions and at pow-wows are called intertribal dances.
The World Championship Hoop Dance Contest is held annually the first weekend of February at the Heard Museum of Native Culture and Arts in Phoenix, Arizona. The 2007 contest attracted 73 dancers, the most in the championship’s 19-year history, and more than 10,000 spectators from across the U.S. and Canada and as far afield as Europe and Asia. The dancers compete in five divisions: Senior, Adult, Teen, Youth and Tiny Tot. In 2007, the tiniest of the Tots was 11 months old.
Dancers in the southwestern U.S. tend to use fewer hoops and dance slower, while dancers from the northern U.S. and Canada dance faster and use more hoops. Modern dancers generally use more hoops than dancers did in the past. Dallas Chief Eagle, a member of the Rosebud Lakota (Sioux) Nation who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, was inspired in his youth by a dancer who used five hoops in his dances; Dallas uses as many as 27 in his signature dance, “Nurturing the Tree of Life.”
Nobody really knows when and where hoop dancing originated, but some scholars feel that the people of Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico were the first to do a dance in which the dancer moved through a hoop. Wherever it started, hoop dancing spread widely among Native Americans in the United States and the First Nations of Canada and has a central symbolic place and importance to Native people of many different tribes.The hoop represents the circle of life, which has no beginning or end, as well as the endless cycles of day and night and summer and winter. In some tribes, hoop dances have a healing role to restore balance and harmony to the world; these dances are generally not performed outside of healing ceremonies or for outsiders. Those kinds of hoop dances that are performed or featured in competitions and at pow-wows are called intertribal dances.
The World Championship Hoop Dance Contest is held annually the first weekend of February at the Heard Museum of Native Culture and Arts in Phoenix, Arizona. The 2007 contest attracted 73 dancers, the most in the championship’s 19-year history, and more than 10,000 spectators from across the U.S. and Canada and as far afield as Europe and Asia. The dancers compete in five divisions: Senior, Adult, Teen, Youth and Tiny Tot. In 2007, the tiniest of the Tots was 11 months old.
Dancers in the southwestern U.S. tend to use fewer hoops and dance slower, while dancers from the northern U.S. and Canada dance faster and use more hoops. Modern dancers generally use more hoops than dancers did in the past. Dallas Chief Eagle, a member of the Rosebud Lakota (Sioux) Nation who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, was inspired in his youth by a dancer who used five hoops in his dances; Dallas uses as many as 27 in his signature dance, “Nurturing the Tree of Life.”
In addition to his performing, Dallas Chief Eagle is teaching and training future champions at the Hoop Dance Society he started on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Hoop dancing was once the exclusive province of adult men, but is now spread across the generations and practiced by both male and female dancers—thanks in large part to Dallas’ talented protégé, Jasmine Pickner, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe who made history in 2001 when she broke the gender barrier and became the first female winner at the World Hoop Dance Championships.
Below, Dallas dances in Iowa with his daughter Star. Be sure to catch Dallas and Jasmine with Dayton's own Rhythm in Shoes in Dayton on March 5-6!
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