Today’s hooping craze is not quite the same old Hula dance from the ’50s

It happened at a music festival, as you probably could have guessed.

“There was a girl who let me borrow her hoop, and I haven’t put it down since,” Sarah Noelle Dettmer said.

She doesn’t mean that literally, of course, but the hoop has become a big part of Dettmer’s life. Actually, she said, it’s changed her life.

Hooping is dance. Hooping is meditation. Hooping is exercise. To modern hoopers like Dettmer, hoops aren’t toys, although they’re fun. So what’s a good place and time to hoop, besides an outdoor festival?

“Anytime,” said Dettmer, 21, a vocal performance major at UMKC’s Conservatory of Music. “Like I just hooped before I started making lunch.”

What hooping is not, so much, is Hula Hooping, although the rise of the modern hoop, a conversation piece at festivals and a star on YouTube, comes at an interesting time. This year is the 50th anniversary of Wham-O’s Hula Hoop.

Today’s hoopers mostly make their own hoops, usually out of irrigation tubing and often decorated with colorful tape. The hoops generally are heavier and bigger around than the plastic kind of the 1958 Wham-O craze.

Such hoops are easier to keep up and keep moving, especially for the novice, hoopers say. So if your only experience is the light, plastic kind, time to try anew.

Tim Walsh, author of Wham-O Super Book due out in October, said nostalgia might have something to do with the rise of hooping.

Walsh’s book chronicles 60 years of Wham-O, the colossal toy company that brought us the Hula Hoop, Frisbee, Super Ball and Hacky Sack, to name a few classics.

Some 100 million Hula Hoops and Hula Hoop knockoffs were sold in a very short period. As the story goes, Walsh said, Wham-O got the idea from a 1950s trend in Australia, where cane and bamboo hoops were all the rage.

Wham-O went plastic, got the California kids on board, scored a spot on TV’s “Dinah Shore Show” and the rest is toy fad history, he said.

“Once something is that big, it’s almost inevitable it will come back,” Walsh said.

Today’s hoopers, though, are reaching much further back than 1958. The hoop is a ring, an unbroken circle, ancient and sacred, they say.

And hoopers are reaching out.

Dettmer is back from teaching hooping to youngsters at New Hope, a camp near Seminole, Okla., for children who have a parent in prison. Campers made hoops and learned enough moves for a performance at the end of the week.

Brie Blakeman, a Kansas City Art Institute student, is a member of Kaivalya Hoop Dancers, a troupe based in Colorado that spreads its hoop art internationally. Blakeman returned earlier this month from a Kaivalya tour in India.

“It’s funny to think I didn’t even Hula Hoop as a little kid and now I’m 20 and making a living from hoop dance,” she said.