Thursday, January 22, 2009

Hula Hoops Are Turning Japanese, I Really Think So.



I took this video of amazing performance artist/hula hoop extraordinaire Jessica Bessette (who I've hired for many events) at our VimLab show with Kaskade @ Epic last July when he was on tour for "Strobelite Seduction." He came in early so we could take him boating on Minnetonka, which he loved..but that's another story.

So I was hanging with Kaskade in SoCal a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that he had just been on tour in Japan, where some girls came up to him and said (maybe in Japanese cuz he is fluent in that language) that they wanted to hoop on stage. Apparently they'd seen the You Tube video I posted of Jessica and started their own Kaskade Hula Hooping group. They get together weekly at a park in Tokyo to hoop to his tunes. Many of them even bought the same 21-color LED hoop Jessica has. I told Jess about this and she said they mentioned her on this Japanese blog and I noticed they are featuring Kaskade's tracks on www.Hooping.org.

Learning all of this makes me happy. I love how international the dance community is, and that we are connected to hundreds of thousands of people around the world from Australia to Asia to Africa, by our love of Kaskade's music. And amazing hula hoopers.

2 comments:

  1. this made me grin and giggle, natalie! you helped spread hooplove. :)

    i love reading about it: thanks for writing!

    happy dawn of the age of aquarius tomorrow.

    -jessica
    www.harmonyhoops.com

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  2. Deanne, my hoop mentor and great friend, alerted me to this post and since it involves the two of us, I wanted to set the record straight. It's very cute to see how events transformed from reality to myth! We were actually already hoopers and HUGE Kaskade fans who happened to be living in Tokyo (though neither of us is actually Japanese). Jessica's video was what inspired us to try to hoop onstage with Kaskade when he came to Japan on his Strobelight Seduction tour, but it's not quite right to say that we started hooping in parks in Tokyo because of that -- we had already been having our Yoyogi park hoop-ups for quite some time before that! Sadly the performance with Kaskade didn't happen, but I did get to meet him and talk to him a bit about Tokyo Hooplovers. But I suppose the moral of the story is still the same -- we are all connected and inspired by each other. Thank you Jess and Kaskade!! I hope I'll have the chance to hoop with both of you at some point in the future!!

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