Translator: Cristina Grassi Reviewer: David DeRuwe
(Music)
(Singing)
(End of music)
(Applause) (Cheers)
(Laughs)
Good afternoon everyone. How're you doing?
(Applause) (Cheers)
So, thank you.
So maybe this is the first time
that you've seen an LED hula hoop that changes color before,
but most of you have probably seen one of these.
In fact, I bet most of you have probably tried one.
In the late 1950s, an American toy company
first rolled these out in mass production.
They were a big hit, the entire country went wild,
and all the kids were playing with them.
They made a comeback, around 10 years ago,
when hooping became a popular pastime for music festival-goers in California.
That ended up sparking a huge, worldwide alternative fitness craze,
but this time, the hoops, they're mainly used by adults
as a way to express creativity, dance, and get fit.
Now, there's a place where the hula hoop has always been,
and that is in the circus.
Today, I want to tell you a story
about how I became a professional hula hoop artist.
It might be a little bit different than you would expect.
When I was 13 years old,
I was in high school
in a small town right outside Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
On a rainy winter day,
me and my classmates,
we got presented with an important question:
What do you want to be when you grow up?
It was a serious question,
not one of those parents might ask,
you know, when you're six years old,
and I was supposed to answer truthfully
because my answer was going to decide
what subjects I was going to be learning about in school the year after.
To help me find an answer,
I had to take a computerized test,
a set of multiple choice questions,
and the outcome would give me an idea
about the kind of job that I might like to do.
So I took the test,
and my result was: a pastry chef, baker, or jam-maker.
(Laughter)
Now, I'll admit, I had indeed baked a cake or two in my childhood years,
which I really enjoyed,
mainly because I got to eat them afterwards,
but I didn't bear a secret passion for jam,
and I didn't want to dedicate my school years
to the preservation of fruit,
and I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up,
and I really felt like that should be OK,
but according to my teacher, it wasn't OK.
I had to pick at least the direction I wanted to take,
be it baking, jam making,
or perhaps becoming a biologist, or a mathematician.
But I never made a decision,
and my school, instead,
they gave me all the classes that weren't yet overfull.
I'd spend my days behind my desk being bored, uninterested,
and completely under-stimulated.
And this resulted in me failing most of my subjects,
which, in turn, made me feel like I just didn't have anything in life
that I was good at.
And that's a feeling
that I continued to have for most of my teenage years,
and it wasn't more than a couple years after that,
that I left school, unimpressed,
pretty uneducated, and also, without graduating.
The reality was that I hated school.
It felt like my school hated me,
and I didn't want go on and study
because why would I study something that I had absolutely no interest in?
This, to me, it seemed blatantly obvious,
and yet everyone around me seemed to be doing it.
I ended up a high school dropout with at least 12 different jobs
before I reached the age of 20.
And it became pretty clear to me ...
if I was going to have a shot of living a happy and meaningful life,
I was going to have to find something
that I loved to do more than anything
and then create a living out of that.
That's easier said than done.
After all, I didn't really even have anything that I was even good at.
Don't get me wrong.
I was really good at folding towels,
I was really good at screwing caps onto tubes of toothpaste,
but I didn't feel like any of those skills
were going to land me a job
that I wanted to jump out of bed for in the morning.
And some people are born with a natural special talent.
They're born to sing,
or they're born to dance,
or they have rhythm in their blood,
or the brains of a scientist and the willpower to change the world.
Well, that wasn't really me,
but I did always dream of being somebody like that,
somebody who would actually make a difference,
but without a special talent, or even an interest,
where was I ever going to begin?
As a kid, I never did any dance.
I never did gymnastics.
In fact, I was the girl who'd get picked last in gym class
because I had two left feet,
I was super slow,
and every single time that I would play dodge ball,
I would walk out with a black eye, every time.
My confidence was pretty much nonexistent,
and that didn't really change
until my friend handed me a large, adult-sized green and pink hula hoop.
I'd just turned 21 years old.
Now, you should know one thing ...
I was definitely not a natural at hula hooping either.
But that's the great thing about a circus discipline
which is essentially just a kid's toy.
Anyone can pick it up and have a go.
So I picked up the hoop, and I had a go,
and before I knew it, I could move it around my waist.
And I worked out that I could get onto YouTube,
and I could watch all the seven videos that were available at the time,
(Laughter)
and they had hula hoop performers slinking around the stage,
manipulating hoops all over their body,
all whilst bending over backward and sitting on their own head.
I remembered my school gym class,
and I kind of wanted to quit straight away.
To put into perspective, at this point in my life,
I can't even touch my toes,
and if you think about it, why would I?
As a professional jam-maker,
I would probably store my jars on the top shelf, eye level at least,
and yet, whenever I was hula hooping,
there just wasn't anything else in the world
that I felt like I should be doing,
and I could practice alone with a computer and some music,
and I would just lose all track of time,
and hours became days, weeks, months.
And I realized, I found a hobby,
something that I couldn't stop dreaming of,
something that also gave me physical evidence
of the fact that if you repeat something enough times,
eventually, it'll become automatic,
and when you don't even need to think anymore
for your brain and your body to process the information,
you're going to end up getting good at it.
And I was convinced that this is obviously what I should be doing
for the rest of my life.
And I got a chance, and I took it.
I quit my job, and I actually ran away, and I joined the circus.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I went from selling soap in a cosmetic shop, full-time,
to sleeping two tents away from the elephants
and performing 21 shows a week
under a five thousand-seater big top in India.
I got paid almost no money.
I hula-hooped my way through countless episodes of dysentery,
but I loved to perform, and I loved India,
and I ended up staying for two years.
I left the circus, eventually,
but I stayed, and I kept performing
inside the Indian entertainment industry,
hula-hooping at corporate events, and weddings, and parties,
and actually every random situation you could possibly imagine
having a hula-hooping girl added to it.
(Laughter)
I was there.
But when I got back to Europe,
I wanted to keep my new job as a circus artist,
but the reality was that I just wasn't really good enough yet,
and I by no means could compare my act
to those of the artists that I watched on YouTube
that I just adored,
and even though my act, it worked well,
sandwiched in between the Bollywood dancing fire eater
and the elephant parade,
I'd only being practicing for a couple of years,
and on top of that,
everyone in Europe is tall and blonde, so if I wanted to stand out,
I was going to have to up my game.
If I wanted to play, I was going to have to get good.
So, I did what came naturally.
I moved to London,
and I started working on the street ...
as a street performer.
(Laughter)
I performed hundreds or maybe even thousands of shows
on the riverside of the Thames in the summer of 2008.
All of them, they started out with having no audience.
I had to convince every single person walking past that they should stop,
and stay, and watch my act.
One by one, I assembled a crowd. I'd give them my best tricks.
I'd try to win them over, and I'd do everything I can
to make sure that they'd give me some money before they leave.
To successfully pull off a street show, it felt like pure magic.
To start with nothing and then end up with a big group of people,
clapping and cheering, and they didn't even know
that they were going to see a show.
They were just going about their day.
They never even asked you to perform, ever,
and there you are, standing in the middle of the street, doing it anyway.
It was probably the most sobering and also the most difficult way
of being a hula hooping girl with a job.
I had to get streetwise in all the ways that you can imagine.
There is the weather,
performers competing for the space that they work in.
There's meeting and hanging out with the homeless.
the drug addicts.
And then there was the day where I watched one human statue performer
throw a brick at another one's head
because he happened to be wearing the same costume as him.
(Laughter)
He ended up putting him in the hospital where he later died.
But at the same time, I found a type of freedom in my work
which motivated me more than anything, and I absolutely thrived on this.
I would jump out of bed in the morning, not because I had to,
but because I wanted to.
I also got to meet the most incredible people that I'd ever met ...
this crazy group of street performers that were shaped and grown
by years of working the city squares, pavements, and riversides of the world.
They were thick-skinned and full of stories
that I only ever imagined happen in books.
And I did as many shows as I could,
and I got to make as many changes as I needed to make things better,
and as a result, I got better.
From that day, I would always be a street performer,
and I also went on to get an official education
at two different circus schools,
and I graduated in 2011 with a degree in circus arts.
That's a real thing.
It's fully university accredited,
fully paid for without any outstanding debts,
by myself, by working with my hula hoops.
(Applause)
In the first summer of me doing the street shows,
I got videoed and uploaded countless times onto YouTube
by people who watched my show.
And in the same way that I taught myself how to hula hoop,
I now got to return this favor to thousands of other people
who would send me emails from all over the world to tell me
they saw a video on YouTube,
and they got inspired to pick up a hoop and just have a go,
regardless of their age, sex, culture, physical background,
or any limitations that they might have.
And now, nine years after I started, I still continue to practice every day,
so I can get better.
I work with companies on large circus productions,
I've performed my acts at the most beautiful events all over the world
in more than 30 countries so far,
and whenever I get a chance, I take my hoops back out onto the street
to perform for anyone who might be randomly passing by.
Sometimes people come up to me after my show,
and they give me compliments.
They tell me how talented that they think I am,
but I honestly feel that talent has nothing to do with it.
I certainly wasn't born with rhythm in my blood,
but I found something that I loved to do more than anything,
and I put 100% of my effort into making that passion into a purpose
which would go on to dominate all of my daily decisions.
In the end, does it matter if you make money doing the thing you love
or if you make money so that you can do the thing you love?
It's a personal preference, but what I think matters the most
is that we find the thing that we love so much,
and we give ourselves a purpose in life by being captivated by those passions,
whatever they may be.
I mean, my weapon of choice happens to be a piece of plastic hose,
shaped into a circle, covered in sticky tape ...
a completely random and unexpected object which changed everything that I had
and ended up giving me absolutely everything that I ever wished for.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)