Hoop Dance Instructor and Motivational Speaker Brittany Hofreiter was a hit with our Spring Break campers. Her message had an enormous impact on our wahines’ self-image and personal power.
Hoop dancing is a style of artistic movement using one or more hoops. It combines technical moves with freestyle dancing, usually performed with music. Instead of the classic toy “hula hoops”, hooping uses customized hoops that are often heavier and larger. Anyone can hoop, regardless of age, size or ability.
While on the surface hoop dancing is playful and engaging, it can also be a powerful meditation or centering tool that requires a body-brain connection. Brittany is brilliant at using this opportunity to connect with young women to talk about their self-image.
We asked Brittany to share some of her ideas and goals with us, her answers are below. Her energy and enthusiasm are always welcome at our programs!
What is your interest in working with teen girls?
My interest in working with teen girls comes from my very vivid experience of being one myself. As an adult, I am still undoing some of the limiting and hurtful views I developed about my own body and what it was capable of. It shouldn’t have taken me until my mid-twenties to fall in love with myself and know that the only limits I operated under were ones I conceived myself or allowed others to give me. It doesn’t have to be this way. There needs to be a shift. Teens need to work on the fundamentals of loving themselves and building themselves up. They need to surprise themselves so that they are constantly renewing their sense of pride and tenacity so that, when they go to sleep every night, their minds are swimming in all that they can do, not all that they fear they cannot.
What do you love most about hoop dancing?
What I love about hoop dancing is that I am constantly surprising myself. It is this aspect of hoop dance that helped me see how powerful a tool it can be to combat the very real insecurities teens are battling. Hoop dancing, or “hooping,” as it is often called, is turning what I cannot do YET into what I rock at. It’s allowing my body to express what my mind cannot. It is beauty, it is strength, grace, ability, creativity, progression, it is pride and it is joy. What better words could you want a teen girl to have dancing around that limitless mind of hers? When I am hooping, I am never doubting myself. When I am hooping, anything is possible.
What do you hope your students will learn from your class?
I hope that any students I am lucky enough to teach will come away with a seed planted. That there will be a shift in the way they see themselves, perhaps subtle at first, but that each time they pick up a hoop, each time they dance a little dance, each time they share their hoop with a friend, the roots will grow stronger and soon, they will blossom into young women who love and believe in themselves, appreciate and admire their bodies, explore and engage their curiosity that has the power to change worlds. I want them to see themselves how we see them; boundless, powerful and capable. I want to be their mentor and for them to be each other’s mentors, to see the importance of sisterhood and to feel the power of their words and actions. I want to see them build each other up rather than compare themselves to one another. I want them to be fiercely themselves and to greet anyone that doubts them with a smile that says “just you wait and see.”
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Contact Brittany directly for more information about her youth and adult hoop classes. She can be reached at 808-280-4343.