Junior Wows Town Meeting With Hula Hoop Dancing Skills
Junior Wows Town Meeting With Hula Hoop Dancing Skills
Haley Rovner put some pep into everyone’s Monday morning with her hula hoop dancing performance during Town Meeting on Aug. 28.
And what exactly is hula hoop dancing?
“I usually call it hula hoop dancing. But it is hula hooping, just with a few tricks thrown in,” said Rovner, a junior.
It was certainly not her first time in front of a crowd -- she’s been performing with Le PeTiT CiRqUe, an all-kids circus based in Los Angeles for more than two and a half years. The group performs locally and internationally, and Rovner has traveled as far as Montreal with them.
She got started in hula hooping at about 3 years old when she saw some of her friends doing it. Her competitive nature kicked in, and she wanted to be better than all of them. She kept practicing until she could go for hours at a time. She entered a competition at 9 years old and hula hooped for 2 hours and 45 minutes -- only stopping because she was told to.
From there, her training took a new approach.
“When I was 9 or 10, I saw a video of someone doing tricks on YouTube and started teaching myself her routine and then gradually started going to more workshops and I became a certified instructor when I was 10,” she said.
A lot of the skills are now second nature to her, but she does still practice for one or two hours a day, sometimes more if she has a show coming up. She has performed in front of crowds of up to 7,000 people.
“I’m not really planning on going into it as a profession because it’s not really stable and it’s just a hard life, but if I could into Cirque du Soleil that would be awesome!” she said. “I’d like to perform in some way when I’m older.”
Sometimes people tell her they can’t do what she does because they don’t have the hips for it, or they’re too old or any other number of reasons.
“Really anyone can do it,” she said. “You shouldn’t let anything hold you back from trying it!”
Sage Hill School
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