…hoop dancing, for a lot of tribes or nations, it was a healing dance or a very ceremonial dance, and that was usually done in time when people or the community needed healing. For my brother and I… it's been a long journey. It's been pretty amazing where the hoops have taken us. And in general context of hoop dance, what it does is it represents how everything is connected, how one thing turns into another thing, just how the world and how everything shifts from one thing to another and how it comes, cycles back around. – Samsoche Sampson
World-renowned hoop dancer and interdisciplinary artist Samsoche Sampson joined the morning show recently discussing his heritage, his journey as a hoop dancer, and much more – including the affirmative power in powwow dancing, how he and his wife found their way to Grand Rapids where Samsoche is the outreach coordinator at the MacRostie Art Center, and how his dad, Will Sampson, landed the part as Chief Bromden in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Samsoche has an exhibit opening at Springboard for the Arts in the Twin Cities later this month. The public is invited to the opening as well as a performance by him and his brother Lumhe on February 17th.
…one of my teachers had suggested that maybe I do…what he called an analytical abstraction. So what that is… you take a photograph or still life of something and you focus on one aspect of that photo or image… whether it be a curves or straight lines that are found in the image, and then you start layering those. So each layer would be a different aspect of that photo. And then once you layer enough of them together, they kind of create this cool abstraction of the original image or picture…it turned out to be a lead to something really cool… Samsoche Sampson
Click on the green bubble above for the whole interview!
