The spectacular dance contest that brings nations together

There's no better place to see hoop dancers at the top of their game than at the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest in Phoenix, Arizona.

Sitting in a circle around a big drum, a group of men struck a deep, reverberating beat. Their voices rose and fell in harmony, while in the arena a dancer picked up speed. Spinning around, he locked six hoops around his shoulders and arms and flapped them like an eagle in flight, then snapped the hoops together to form a globe and held it up to the sky.

Held over two days each February in Phoenix, Arizona, the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest is the most prestigious celebration of a complex Indigenous dance style that requires speedy footwork and skilful mastery of up to as many as 50 hoops. It's the Olympics of hoop dancing – and the 2024 contest drew a record 121 dancers, representing dozens of Indigenous communities across the US and Canada, including children from the nearby Navajo Nation and a senior (as over-40s are classed) from the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba. Inscrutable judges were positioned around the arena, pens in hand, ready to grade each dancer on five skills: precision, timing/rhythm, showmanship, creativity and speed. Up for grabs in each of the five divisions, which are sorted by age, not gender, were cash prizes totalling $25,000 (£19,400).

But, "it's more than winning and losing," says Terry Goedel, who has competed in the contest "probably" 28 times. "It's about holding your head with pride to the world and saying: This is who I am, and this is what I share with you."

The exact origin of hoop dance is a little muddled, but it is thought to have originated at the Taos Pueblo. According to ICT, many tribal groups across North America used the hoop to symbolise the circle of life in healing ceremonies. Today's modern form, which sees hoop dancers spin and interlock multiple hoops around their bodies to represent animals and other symbols, emerged in the 1930s when Tony White Cloud of the Jemez Pueblo began performing for entertainment rather than healing alone, creating visual symbols with his willow hoops as a method of storytelling.

White Cloud drew crowds and found fame as he performed at events across the US and appeared in films with Lucille Ball and Gene Autry. Indigenous people who saw him perform at events such as the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in New Mexico were inspired to develop their own styles, and soon modern hoop dance spread across North America.

Goedel, who is Yakama and Tulalip, was living on the Tulalip reservation in Washington when he saw hoop dancing for the first time in 1972. "It was as though a light had been lit inside of me," he says. Until that day, he had been struggling "to identify [his] Native roots". "When I found [them], I wanted to share those feelings with the world, because it made me feel so good… the pride that I have in my heritage."

Hoop dancing was a "a dying art" when he first started, according to Goedel. Even the first world championship, held in 1990, drew only seven dancers. Goedel credits the dance's survival partly to its embrace by Indigenous communities across North America. At the 2024 contest, this breadth was evidenced by the diversity of regalia worn by the dancers, from the orca adorning Goedel's silk shirt, which signifies his US north-western roots, to the buckskin clothing of dancers from the Plains and the three-feathered kastoweh headdress worn by a Mohawk dancer from the north-east.

Hoop dance, Goedel says, "is handed down a lot by family". Often this sharing within families is about "trying to engage [children] in finding out who they are; identifying with their heritage," he says. Unlike other dances that require cost and labour-intensive regalia, starting out in hoop dancing requires only hoops. "When my son and my nephew began dancing with me more than 20 years ago, they had their tennis shoes on," Goedel says. "So it's kind of an avenue for them to slowly walk into the Native dance world."

For those without that family connection, there's the New Mexico-based Lightning Boy Foundation, whose mission is to connect young Indigenous people to their culture through hoop dancing. The foundation carries on the legacy of two beloved dancers who died at young ages: eight-year-old prodigy Valentino Rivera; and his mentor, the foundation's first instructor, nine-time world champion hoop dancer Nakotah LaRance. The foundation offers free hoop dance instruction to Indigenous youth aged 4-18, as well as materials and travel expenses for competitions, including its own Nakotah LaRance Youth Hoop Dance Championship held annually at Santa Fe's Museum Of Indian Arts & Culture.

"Everything I know about hoop dancing, I learned from him," says ShanDien Sonwai LaRance of her brother Nakotah. LaRance, who is Hopi, Tewa, Navajo and Assiniboine, dances "with such fierceness and aggression, almost like the male dancers. That's a reflection of learning from my older brother," she says. "He was known for being one of the fastest dancers, and also for his really crazy, wild tricks and throws. So I've inherited those moves, and that's what we share and teach [at the] Lightning Boy Foundation."

LaRance has been dancing since she was eight and is now the foundation's master instructor. "Hoop dancing is a difficult dance to learn," she says, listing hand-to-eye coordination, speed, imagination and drive as some of its necessary attributes. But these challenges instil values in young dancers. "It teaches our young kids how to try and fail and continue to try. And realise that just because we drop a hoop doesn't mean we stop dancing. We pick it up and we act like nothing happened."

Over the past 15 years, LaRance has seen how hoop dancing has brought confidence to Indigenous youth. "It's a tangible piece of their culture that they can hold with them and take all over the world," she says. Indeed, LaRance and her brother both performed internationally with Cirque du Soleil.

In July 2024, a few months after the World Championships, I attended the Art Market and Juried Show in the Mohawk community of Akwesasne in upstate New York. There, Feryn King, an accomplished hoop dancer, aerialist and teacher, who has also performed internationally with Cirque du Soleil, stepped out in front of the crowd to give a short presentation on the hoop dance's origins in healing ceremonies. She explained that, even today, hoop dancing has the power to bring healing energy, for those watching as well as the dancers. Then, as a track blending traditional drumming, hip-hop and electronica started up, she and the Akwesasne Youth Hoop Troupe began dancing, lifting each foot off the ground in time with the rapid beats, spinning hoops around their bodies and fluttering them above their heads like butterfly wings.

King later tells me that she likes to begin performances with a short presentation because sometimes people mistake hoop dancing for hula hooping. "It's important for people to know the history," she says. Her distinctive choice of music, different to the austere drums and voices I'd heard at the World Championship, helps keep younger dancers engaged. "I try to create new choreography for them every year," she says. "I'm trying to inspire them and keep them dancing."

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King is hoping to attend the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest for the first time in February 2025, its 35th year. Her busy schedule of teaching and dancing at all kinds of events, from weddings to corporate dinners, keeps her at the physical condition demanded of the competition. LaRance, a seasoned competitor, says that, in the six months prior to the event, she alternates daily between two to three hours of hoop dancing and running six miles. She also has the additional responsibility of making regalia for all the Lightning Boy dancers. This year she made 15 sets of regalia, including that of the winner, Enriquez.

Is it unusual to make your competitor's regalia? I ask her. Hoop dancing "represents the circle of life, and all of the beings within it and it comes with a certain level of respect," she answers. "Even though we're all competing against each other, we're all very supportive. Because that is the way of hoop dancing."

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