LED lights add an eye-catching dimension to a sport that can be both goofy and meditative. (Credit: Kaju Sarkar)

It’s easy to spot Baton Rouge’s newest and most unique athletic and aesthetic phenomenon. Multiple fire hoops spin sublimely around delicately balanced dancers on any given night at the parade grounds.

Even if you have seen several of these athletes around town, however, you probably figured they were calling upon a childhood pastime, using the centripetal force of their hips to move a large ring around them for as long as possible: hula hooping.

If so, you figured wrong.

“It’s called hooping or hoop dance,” said Kim Forman, founder of Red Stick Hoopers, Baton Rouge’s bastion for the blazing ballet of a sport. “You can’t call it a hula hoop unless it’s Wham-O.”

Litigation threats from the monopolizers of the hula-hooping industry aside, hooping is a sport that’s hard to define in technical terms. Generally, hooping involves heavier, customized hoops, rather than the plastic toys of the past. But, according to Forman, it’s a combination of dance, fitness, drama, spirituality, and really just about anything else you can think of.

“It can be anything you want it to be,” Forman said. “It’s different for everybody.”

Forman said she took a crack at the sport around four years ago, right when the String Cheese Incident – a band based out of Colorado – re-popularized the practice with its acrobatic in-concert performances. Though she struggled with it at first and turned to spinning poi, after about a year she came back to the hoop – with positive results.

“Suddenly, I just picked it up without any trouble at all and started doing things quickly I had never dreamed I’d be able to do at all,” Forman said.

The sport appeals to both ends of the spectrum of experience, and that, Forman said, is one of the best qualities of hooping.

“Even as a beginner, you can teach other people,” she said.

Though there was little other Baton Rogue interest in the sport – Forman says maybe one or two others expressed a desire to form some sort of club – she began making and selling hoops, as well as teaching classes to interested parties from both the poi and the dance worlds. Soon, demand grew enough to inspire Forman’s decision to create a Facebook group for the Red Stick Hoopers, who now meet weekly to practice their craft.

Forman said there are dynamic changes when hooping alone rather than hooping socially.

“It’s very different in intent when you are alone,” she said. “My solo hooping practice is very concentrated. If I’m just in the flow, it’s meditative. I just get into my zone and forget about everything that’s going on.”

“When you’re hooping with other people, it’s more about laughing and having fun and being silly. It’s a toy, but you can do all sorts of amazing things with it. When you’re with a group, you can feed off of one another.”

Now, the Red Stick Hoopers feature a variety of styles, from Forman’s more technical approach to the more free-flowing, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants tactics of the less experienced hoopers. Forman said that the hoopers are all female as of now, but she hopes to diversify the group’s gender makeup in the near future.

Of course, the sport’s most show-stopping element comes with Forman’s specialty: fire.

“You have to get over the fact that you are completely surrounded by flame,” said Forman, who is also a member of Jebediah Goodstuff’s Pyromaniacal Olde-Tyme Traveling Sideshow, a local fire performance arts troupe. “It’s really close, and it’s really hot, and it’s really loud.”

But though the fire makes hooping more difficult, it’s the achievement in the face of difficulty that Forman loves most about fire hooping.

“I’ve seen people do stuff that I thought would be impossible with a fire hoop,” she said. “Just about anything is possible.”