Reknowned Hoopdancer Baxter comes to Alpine to teach workshop April 4-6 at the Granada: tickets still available

By Marlys Hersey, Editor

Hooping luminary and hoopdance teacher extraordinaire Baxter is coming to Alpine to teach a weekend workshop at the Granada Theater, Friday, April 4 through Sunday, April 6. This is the first time Baxter will be teaching in West Texas.

Hooping since 2002, Jonathan Livingston Baxter is known for his rhythmic style, which evolved largely as he hooped alone, blindfolded (to avoid being aware of others watching him), in his backyard in North Carolina.

While he may have started hooping for physical benefits, he has stuck with it because, as he told the Gazette in a phone interview, “It’s like a movement practice for me. I feel better. I come away from it feeling clear. It brings me a type of peace. Most of the world right now is dealing with depression, it seems like. I don’t think that’s some kind of false signal; I really think that people are truly depressed and that they want a way out of it. I try to explain hooping as potential cure for some of us for that.

When I first started hooping, it really was a quest for mastery, and a little bit of exploration. I didn’t set off saying Hey, I want to deal with depression…. If you don’t grow up with counseling, or if you lose sight of the counseling you did have, you can sometimes not even realize that you’re in a state of depression. You can just all of sudden think the world sucks or you go numb to everything, or you’re not in love anymore. When you start studying it, it’s like Oh, okay, my body is sick, not my head. It’s my body.”

Responsible for pioneering several moves in hooping, the charismatic 40-year-old hoopdancer travels the U.S. and Canada teaching hooping workshops embued with his own hooping philosophy, the Hoop Path. For Baxter (and many of his students), hooping is more than just a way to have fun and get exercise, it’s a practice, a means to living more consciously.

While there are now many hoop fitness and hoop dancing classes offered all over the world, Baxter’s approach is unusual; rather than teach a series of hooping skills, routines, or tricks, per se, the inveterate hooper leads students, regardless of hooping skill level, through a series of exercises to help them tap more deeply into their own authentic ways of moving with the hoop—largely with the aid of a great variety of music.

Though he started teaching more or less on a lark, ever since he began weekly hooping classes in his hometown of Carrboro, North Carolina in early 2005, he has not stopped.

“I have been doing this a long time,” says Baxter. “After a while,” he says of his repeat students, “they’re coming for the opportunity, for the space that I create, so they can be rejuvenated in their creativity. I try to teach more of the movement concepts. People get one shot at me a year, so I have to teach what I think will impact them the most in that year. When someone starts to come to many workshops, many years, we call them a ‘HoopPather.’ It’s not a label, it’s just a tribal thing. The funny thing is, the deeper people get into the HoopPath, the less they need me. I have HoopPathers that totally basically ignore me now,” he says, laughing hard. “And I’m cool with that; that means I’ve done my job. They’re feeling creative enough, they don’t need me to tell them what to work on, but they still want to come, they still want to be in the space. [That] means I’m doing a good job of building a container that’s more attractive than me. And that’s always what I wanted to do.”

Baxter brings his three-day Hoop Path “Puri*Fire” workshop to Alpine, which he describes as similar to “a creative writing class for hoopers who wish to retune their hoop dance toward their own, unique creative voice.”

“I’m an improvisational hooper,” explained Baxter when asked to elaborate. “My goal is to clear my mind enough that when the song comes on, I move to the song. It sounds so easy and simple, but it can be so hard for people to break out of their patterns. For me, the real the goal of [this workshop] is the idea that if we open to moving improvisationally, that our body will actually get what it wants. Just like in the same way that my physical voice sounds like something to you, my physical voice, my movement of my body has a ring to it that’s unique to me. And if I can open up and move creatively, then I’m exposed to my body’s voice. I hear it for the first time. I don’t hear me doing an impersonation, I hear what it likes to do, what things come through it.

And that’s what this Puri*Fire tour is about: it’s meant to stoke people creatively, to say, ‘Look: the same creativity that you use in your hoopdance, or that you use to write can be the same creativity that you use to solve a conflict with your husband, or your girlfriend or your wife, can be the same creativity you use to handle your kids, or handle a confrontation with somebody.’ Creativity is creativity. It’s like a force. It’s basically how well we use our imagination.”

The workshop will span Friday evening, from 6-9:30 pm, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 1-5 pm. Cost of the full three-day workshop, focusing on the Body, the Mind, and the Spirit, respectively, costs just $135; partial workshop packages are also available for less.

“You don’t have to be a hoop master to come to this,” Baxter clarifies. “Everyone, regardless of skill, is equal at HoopPath. No one wants to intimidate or be intimidated by anyone. It’s all about moving past that stuff, and just dancing.”

“This is the first big hooping workshop in the Big Bend,” notes local instigator Marlys Hersey, “and a tremendous opportunity for all of us hoopers in the region to come together to hoop, and to learn with Baxter, who is not only a great hoopdancer, but a magnanimous and devoted teacher. We’re really fortunate to get Baxter to come to us, and to be able to hoop in the sweet space of the Granada Theater.”

For more information or to sign up for Baxter’s Puri*Fire workshop, please visit: www.hooppath.com and select “workshops,” then “Alpine, TX.”