Dancing with hoops to be teen world champion at 17

PHOENIX — Talon Ree Duncan had a good semifinals and leads the teen division by 5 points, but there’s still one more round before he can call himself the 2016 world champion hoop dancer.

Duncan, 17, is calm and collected as the finals get underway. The division is tough: Only three dancers made it to this round.

His brother paints a thick red line across Duncan’s cheekbones and over his nose. The look, inspired by his San Carlos Apache and Hidatsa heritage, is meant to recall war paint.

“And I save it for my final round because that’s the round I want to feel like a warrior,” he says.

As the announcer calls his name over the loudspeaker, Duncan walks to the sandy center of a grassy amphitheater. He arranges 10 hoops in a circular pattern on the ground and nods when he’s ready to begin.

Duncan is thin for his 6 foot 2 frame. Despite his lankiness, when the drumbeat starts, his body moves gracefully to the rhythm. One by one, he kicks up the hoops with his feet, jumping through them and spinning them on his arms. As the song continues, the moves get more complicated. He forms shapes like a butterfly by stringing all 10 hoops on his body. Then without missing a beat, he moves them all up his torso and into his hands to form a sphere.

His parents watching anxiously in the audience. “It is so exciting to see your children excel at something that they enjoy so much,” says his mother, Doreen Duncan.

Still, watching the competition is hard. “I get crazy nervous,” she says.

Modern hoop dancing is more performance than ceremony, she says, so dancers today are open to incorporating modern influences into their routines.

“There are a lot of references to the living world around the dancers themselves or things that are included in their lifestyle as modern people,” she says. So in addition to forming animals like eagles and horses out of their hoops, dancers have been known to use moves like the Harlem shake and even the moonwalk.

Creativity is a big point getter, according to David Lee, one of the contest’s five judges. “Some of them have similar routines, but when they switch it up, that’s what I like,” he says. “Something different.” Dancers can use as many hoops as they want, but he says more doesn’t necessarily mean better. In the end, dancers are judged on five main factors: speed, creativity, precision, timing and showmanship.

For good dancers, scoring well can mean more than just a title. Regardless of how they place, dancing at the world championships offers them exposure. Cirque du Soleil has recruited several dancers from the contest to join its traveling shows. And many families at the contest are regularly asked to perform at corporate and educational events all over the world. The Duncans, for example, have traveled to more than 30 countries since they began performing together.

“This is our way of life,” says Alex Wells, a member of the Lil’wat First Nation in British Columbia. He has been hoop dancing for 26 years, and with three world champion titles under his belt, he makes his living performing. “It’s given me a good life,” he says.

It has also provided him with an extended family of sorts. The world championship, for example, tends to bring many of the same families together each year. “There are a lot of us families here that are bonded by this contest itself,” he says. “We kind of adopt each other.”