Just one video of a renowned hula-hoop performer convinced Taylor Duffrin to buy her first hoop in 2014. Hooping became her gateway into flow arts – an umbrella term for creative, movement-based activities that also includes juggling and fire-eating. Soon, Duffrin began posting her own videos on social media performing under the name Taylor Flows.
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Since then, she’s built up a database of over 600 trick tutorials on the creator platform Patreon, and she performs and teaches flow arts around the world. When she’s home in Milwaukee, she hoops at private parties and local festivals, including Float Fest and this year’s Summerfest. Here, Duffrin shares how she spun her skills into a full-time, globetrotting career.
What do you remember about your first performance?
I was shaking in my boots. I had such bad impostor syndrome, too, because I had only been hooping for about a year, and I was going to be in front of 30,000 people at Suwannee Hulaween – a festival in Florida. On stage, during the first few performances, I was physically shaking. But then you just kind of get over it. It’s like exposure therapy – that’s what I tell a lot of my performance students.
The first hour of the festival was probably pretty rough. And then the rest of it was just super fun. It was great to be in a setting where I could do what I wanted to do professionally. I feel like that was such a big catalyst for my career because it started to produce the reality for myself that I could do something with this.
These days, you teach online, but you also teach in person at retreats in different countries. Where’s the farthest place you’ve taught or performed?
Two years after I started hula-hooping was when I got my first teaching gig, in Malaysia. So really far away, but that’s not the farthest. But going there kickstarted me being able to go to other retreats because when you teach at a retreat, it adds you to a list of teachers that a lot of other retreats use as well.
Australia, I think, is the farthest that I’ve ever gone. There was a hoop retreat in Melbourne called Hoop Away. And I spent about a month there teaching at the retreat and then just hanging out in Melbourne.
When did you start doing adding fire tricks to your mix?
I decided about six months after starting [hooping] that I wanted to fire hoop because I saw the online community of fire hoopers and fire artists when I was looking for the hula-hoop community on the internet. I was not the smartest person when I was learning how to do fire stuff because I just assumed that I could teach myself. And it did not go super well – I ended up burning my arm pretty badly.
There’s a line that you can cross in being respectful with fire while also pushing the bounds of what you can do. I feel like I very much learned that lesson the hard way since I chose to teach myself, which has been a driving passion for me to teach people how to play with fire as well, so people don’t make the same mistakes that I did.
Fire-eating sounds even more dangerous than fire-hooping. Is that true?
You know, it’s always so funny because people continuously assume that fire-eating is the worst. But I have never really had any substantial burns from fire-eating, knock on wood.
The thing I like to tell my fire-eating students that’s blatantly obvious is that your mouth is wet. So, although you’re having all this contact within your mouth, it’s actually a great insurance barrier that you don’t get burned.
Now, is that to say that I never burn my mouth? I do. But it’s actually the equivalent of, or a bit less than, burning your mouth on really hot pizza.
When fire-eating, do you taste the fuel?
You do have a light taste of the fuel, but feeling the heat from the fire is the primary thing that you are experiencing. The fuel a little bit, the heat of the fire more so.
One thing that we’re always trained to do is whenever we put the fire in our mouth or pull vapor, we’re always supposed to spit afterwards just because some of the remnants of that fuel can get caught on your tongue. You don’t want to swallow that because it can cause gastrointestinal distress, and you can get headaches.
Tell me about your process of creating trick tutorials.
I started off by trying to make tricks of everything I know. Within hooping, there’s a baseline of tricks – we have all the basics that will help you understand sequencing with hula hooping. It’s like creating choreographies in dancing. So, I started making a baseline of every basic trick, and then started to branch off in variations.
And then, moving up the pyramid, I started to create combos and choreographies of tricks. But even with all these different modalities that I practice under flow arts, I still have weeks where I’m like, “I don’t know what to make a tutorial on.” And keeping that creativity going can sometimes be really hard, especially when you’re a creative as a professional career. That pressure can be a lot, and pressure, I feel, is the enemy of creativity because you don’t really have that free-flowing curiosity. You’re stressed about making the next tutorial, making sure subscribers are happy, [you’re] making money, staying relevant.
But keeping grounded and staying within that position of curiosity rather than pressure has been integral to my practice as a professional creative. It has allowed me to work slightly under stress while also cultivating that creativity.
If I’m ever feeling like I’m running out of ideas, I’ll dedicate more time to play. Rather than delivering and trying to serve a community, I’ll frame it as having a week where I just go into curiosity and exploration within my craft.
Any advice for new hoopers?
I 10-out-of-10 recommend getting into hula-hooping. It helps you with your creativity and helps you stay active. And it brings you to this wonderful, huge community that you would not have guessed is there. There are so many resources to get you into it.
There’s just a small bell curve of annoyance and learning something new — and I think this goes for any hobby. But once you get over that curve, it feels amazing, and you feel so good about yourself. You feel almost unstoppable.
