Dancing with hula hoops may bring back childhood memories for some, but for members of the DePaul Hoop Troupe, hoop dancing is used as an activity for members to express themselves.
“We’re a community of hoop dancers,” Mia Dubinets, president of the club, said. “We provide practice times, classes and performance opportunities, as well as providing a community for hoop dancers to get together and perform for each other.”
The DePaul Hoop Troupe is one of the newest organizations at DePaul this year. The organization started through Dubinets and fellow DePaul students Alexis Kelly and Claire McDonal hoop dancing together throughout the Lincoln Park campus.
“We would take up the whole studio (in the Ray Meyer Fitness Center), and the workers there would come up to us and tell us we couldn’t use the studio if we didn’t pay,” Dubinets said.
Instead of making the hoop dancers pay for usage of the studio, Dubinets, Kelly and McDonal set up an on campus organization in order to receive funding to pay for practice space.
The DePaul Hoop Troupe became an official organization at the University fall quarter, and has 67 members apart of their official Facebook group.
The organization has been attracting members in numerous ways, including performing out in the open and talking to people who take an interest in watching them.
“I actually saw some of the girls from the Hoop Troupe hooping in the quad one day in the fall,” Freshman Angee Verish said. “I stopped to talk to them and they told me to go check them out on OrgSync, and I got involved from there.”
The Hoop Troupe is content with their numbers, due to the amount of space they have to practice in.
“We don’t do a lot of promoting outside of just hooping,” Dubinets said. “We were originally concerned that we would grow too fast.”
The DePaul Hoop Troupe has been participating in at a number of events on campus, including Relay for Life, Fest showcase and the upcoming DemonTHON and Fest.
“Sometimes we get weird looks from carrying our hoops through the Student Center, or dancing in the quad,” Verish said. “But many groups have asked us to perform at their events, which only boosts our confidence more.”
Although hoop dancing has been in existence in numerous forms for hundreds of years, there has been a resurgence recently due to a connection with electronic dance music (EDM). At a performance during the ’90s, jam band The String Cheese Incident began throwing hoops into the crowd for festival attendees to dance with. The Electric Forest Music Festival held in Rothbury, Mich., now has their own hoop troupe to perform at the festival.
“Through that, it kind of caught on big within the Midwest,” Dubinets said. “And now it’s been spreading throughout the rest of the country.”
The group views itself as more of a community than an organization, and that is the part that many members enjoy the most.
“My favorite part of Hoop Troupe is the sense of community between all of us,” Verish said. “It’s an environment to be creative and stay creative with the ‘pressures’ and mindsets of everyone there.”
The DePaul Hoop Troupe has three scheduled performances to close out their first year as an organization, and they hope to keep growing and performing in years to come.