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It’s the hardest thing: Flow on demand. It’s not like your favorite show, where you can punch the right code in and the familiar theme music or opening credits magically appear on your screen. Flow is about an internal experience. Flow is about what you feel. As such, what someone who is not you sees is barely relevant at all to your experience. But in a performance, in a video contest, it matters. Perhaps more than it should.

In watching the videos submitted during Flow Week of Hooping Idol, I was struck by a number of things. First was how many hooped to slow music. I must admit I love this development. When I first began my spinning/hooping life, fast music, hard beats, whompy bass were de rigeur. They still are in some quarters. The first time I spun in front of people to an acoustic track it was a risky thing to do. Not unheard of, exactly, but rare and definitely in the realm of Making An Artistic Statement.

But if the batch of Flow Week entries is taken as a benchmark, in the present moment slow music=Flow. This isn’t necessarily so as any video by Brecken will attest. But it is both delightful and troubling to me that what a few years ago seemed the less-taken path is now the go-to path for “Flow video”. Delightful because: yay! Hooping to slow music is not so weird ! Troubling because: you can Flow to fast, hard music too. You can Flow to no music at all. The music, ultimately, has nothing to do with your Flow. Slow music does not automatically equal Flow. Maybe everyone understands this and I’m just projecting. But I was struck, in watching the Flow Week videos, how almost everyone used songs that were at a slower tempo than usual for hooping videos. It was a stylistic uniformity I didn’t expect. And this fact raised the question for me: is this what everyone (now) thinks Flow is?

Secondly, and more importantly really: this current crop of hoopers have much higher expectations to hoop up to than those that came before. They are putting themselves out there in the context of a competition based as much on style and expression as on technical virtuosity which is something that I – and my generation of hoopers – never did or was ever asked to do. This crop of hoopers is coming up in a post-HoopGirl, post-Hoop Path, post-Hoop Technique world. Much of what was considered new and innovative in the time that I was a newbie hooper is now considered baseline or “basic” in today’s hoop world. Isolations were exotic and hooping in both directions was unheard of; now they aren’t even particularly novel. They have become the baseline. They have become the expected.

Given that context, I can’t imagine what it must be like to enter oneself in a contest such as Hooping Idol in a world where established ideas of Flow exist, as opposed to the world I came up in, where we were all just making it up as we went along.

I guess what I’m most trying to say is: expectations suck balls. And not meeting them has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s inherent worth, or skill, or artistry. To all hoopers and flowsters out there: other people’s expectations are not your responsibility. If they watch what you do and think “it should be more this, it should be less that,” well that’s their issue not yours. Be true to who you are. This is not to say that certain technical elements — how you face the camera, how clean your planes are – aren’t important. Just that they contribute to the overall effect you create, but they are not the defining factors.

On the other hand: be true to who you are. Your Flow most shines when you spin from the center of your authentic self. Flow will not come when you are attempting to hoop up to what someone else thinks you should be. Flow will not come when you try to incorporate every new, currently popular technique out there into a routine or video clip.

Flow only comes when you let that go.

What do others think are “advanced” moves? Let it go.

What do others think is sexy and does “sexy” even matter? Let it go.

What do others think is graceful? Let it go.

What do others think is beautiful? Let it go.

What do others think is Flow? Let it go.

You know who you are. You know what music moves you and what doesn’t. Maybe you’d rather hoop to nothing but your breath (my favorite way even though most of my friends think that’s weird). Whatever you think someone else thinks you should hoop to: Let it go.

The key to Flow: Let Go. Hoop from your center, hoop according to your own rhythm and your own heart. Flow comes from there, not anyplace else. Just there.

So well said Khan! I wholeheartedly agree

<3

Mmhmmm, this is a really great post. I found the flow week challenge incredibly difficult with all the words of expectation, the direction, the stuff to work on ringing in my ears on how to make better videos. “Flow on demand”, good way to put it. Super hard to get lost in the hoop when everyone wants it to look a different way and when you can’t feel anything because it’s freezing outside and you’re just trying not to cry and give up before you run out of daylight LOL. The competition has really made me question why I am hooping again, who I am hooping for, myself, others, a goal, etc.

I think most of us chose slower music because we were given words like “beauty, grace, elegance” and told to “show less”. I think if you were to walk in a room and find us in our “natural flow”, there would be much greater variety in what that looks like, which is maybe the mistake some of us made this week with this challenge. We weren’t true to ourselves and our own “flow”.

I think you really hit the nail on the head when you said all these hoop tricks or patterns aren’t novel anymore. How many times did we see the judges say, “I’m not seeing anything new” “I’m bored”. To the rest of the world who can’t keep the hoop going around their waist, this stuff is phenomenal! But we are putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to entertain with the hoop, not only the public but each other. It’s good, in a way, because it inspires us to better ourselves, but at the same time if we’re always looking for something new instead of genuine, authentic moments inside the hoop, we’re discrediting ourselves and how far we have come.

Beautifully expressed and totally inspired. Bless.XoX

There is a strange and unexpected, albeit unwritten, expectation that the videos will be proper pieces of filmed entertainment and performance. I too was surprised to have venues criticised and filming/editing picked up on. It is excruciating in the time we have.

I am filming all mine on an iPhone! I don’t have a video camera. It takes some doing. Before this neither me nor my husband who is my camera operator, had ever really edited a video. The best we’d done is string footage together with the worst bits cut out. It has been a huge undertaking.

Over here we also have the time difference against us. For us the submission deadline is 7am Saturday morning. So we are usually up most of the night getting it finished and sent.

That said, have never done anything like this before. And I have learnt a huge amount about me in the process. Although it’s very stressful, I am also enjoying lots of it. And we have all done amazingly well and seem to have created a huge amount of viewing interest and enthusiasm from those watching and cheering us on.

We can all be very proud of our efforts. We know why we hoop inside. We should not question that.

Just a bit of devil’s advocate here …

Everybody seems to be getting the “expectations suck balls” part of Khan’s extremely timely post, but the “let it go” part … not so much.

I don’t think that’s Khan’s suggesting that it is possible to eliminate those expectations from the world (or our own minds for that matter), but that being aware of them and chasing away the obligations we put on OURSELVES to adhere to them is something we CAN attempt to do, practice, and get better at. There was nothing to keep the contestants from ignoring the “expectations” (implicit and explicit alike) and doing their own thing. As hard as that may have been. As hard as it is for performers of any type, and plenty of hoopers even in their own backyards. I think this competition is fecund for all kinds of lessons for us. And Khan may have just hit the nail on the head of the biggest one.

I think Lara adds a good point to this, though I don’t think I interpreted that from what Khan was saying. Then again, I may be misinterpreting everything lol. I think hoopers are/were definitely free to do as they wanted, but they also want that sweet grand prize (and it is a sweet prize!!) I agree with Shawnee in the point that the haves are ALWAYS going to have it easier than the have nots in a competition like this. Its a lot easier to get a beautiful shot on the beach if you live on the beach, etc etc. I do think that people can focus on what they DO have, and I think you can “make it work” with what you have if you’ve got determination behind it. Its really hard NOT to feel jealous or disadvantaged when you may not have the financial head start others have. I actually tried out for the real American Idol myself once. I didn’t make it, but a LOT of great people didn’t make it, and a lot of the best vocalists don’t go on to win the show. There is always an element of popularity contest as well. I think about Jordin Sparks, she flew to every single audition city until she was finally accepted, and she went on to win the thing, but I haven’t heard much from her since. Her dad was a football player for the Giants. She was homeschooled so she could focus on singing. She had the advantage of not having a job, and not needing one because her family had the $ to support her. I had to use vacation time to attend a one shot audition/vacation in Charleston, and my parents didn’t really support artistic ventures anyway. It didn’t seem fair, and it may not be at all, but thats just the way things are right now. People complain of multiple phone votes making some contestants go further than others. Really, I think it all comes back to me. I’m NOT an American Idol. I can’t put on the cheesy song and dance for Ford, I’m not what they want, and thats fine. I had a great vacation in Charelston, the audition process was long and full of disappointments, but I’m better for it, and it really made me examine myself and the way I am in the world. The not fairs are always going to be “in your way” if you let them be. It was a very enlightening experience, and a learning one, as I think Hooping Idol is for everyone in different ways, most directly the participants I would imagine. We all just gotta keep on keepin’ on. We all ripple whether we realize it or not