Greetings Flow Artists!
Welcome to another exciting edition of Tutsdays, the tutorial series brought to you by the Flow Arts Institute!
This week’s Tutsday features Mufasa Lee, a multi-prop artist hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, and was shot at FLAME 2017 by Moxie Watts aka Emily Bradley. You can find Mufasa in the fire circle and teaching classes at flow festivals throughout the Midwest, where he pairs his liquid smooth dance style with precise and beautiful tech movements to create a dance you won’t want to miss!
This time around, Mufasa showed us a sweet liquid fold variation with a single hoop.
- Start out holding our hoop on its side, depending on your orientation of the hoop, at a three or nine o’clock position with your arm extended parallel to the ground.
- Swing the hoop until it is touching the backside of your shoulder. Your forearm should be drawing a line directly through the center of the hoop.
- Place your opposite hand near the hoop under your elbow with your thumb down, palm facing out.
- Rotate the hoop around your arm one rotation, so that it is now in front of your arm.
- The next step would be to bring it to your heart center.
- After that we flip the hoop once, push to the next section, and end by folding back over the arm in the reverse of our starting position.
- Then to start the move back over in the opposite direction, grab the hoop with our palm facing out, thumbs down
- Rotate the hoop once, center, rotate, drag to the next section, and again finish while rotating over to the backside of the arm.
- It’s very important when doing this move to keep this line going across your chest, where your arms are parallel to the ground, both hands must stay in that line for this illusion to look visually appealing. So when dragging, make sure your hands don’t drop, and the hoop doesn’t do sort of a little vortex thing in front of you.
- As you start to smooth these maneuvers out, it will start mending together to one weaving pattern.
- From there, you can play with speed, fluctuate body movements, even change levels, But essentially remember thumb down, rotate, center, rotate, opposite, finish with a rotation.
Big thanks to Mufasa for teaching us this awesome trick, Moxie Watts for the video and edit, and FLAME Festival for having us!
We hope to see you all out at FLAME 2018 in less than a month!