Beka Hoop

Choreographer and dancer Rebecca Halls trained from a young age in classical and contemporary dance and is a graduate of the BFA dance program at Concordia University. Rebecca has been doing choreographic research with hoops for the past five years.

She is internationally recognized as one of the leaders in hoop dance, a budding art form that is surfacing around the world. Rebecca has taught workshops across Canada, the USA, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and Taiwan. She has been a panelist, featured instructor and performer at four international hoop conferences including Hoop Convergence (North Carolina, USA), Hoop Camp (California USA), Manchester Hoop Congress (UK) and The European Hoop Conference (Germany). She is continually pushing the boundaries of this art form in her work as a performer, choreographer and teacher by translating concepts and ideas through movement research and exploration.

In 2008 she began collaboration with filmmaker Marites Carino to create the dance for camera piece HOOP. The film has been featured internationally at Filament Film Festival (NY) Cinedans Film Festival (Amsterdam, NL), The Dance for Camera Festival (NY), the Festival International du Film sur l'Art (Montreal) and the Dance Camera West Festival (LA). In 2009 the film was awarded Bravo!FACT & commissioned by EMPAC DANCE MOViES. HOOP was recently nominated in the performing arts category at the Yorkton Film Festival. In 2011/2012 Rebecca will be collaborating with Marites on a second project to create Hringur, the sequel to HOOP that will be shot in Iceland.

In 2009 Rebecca founded IHOOPU Dance in Montreal; the first hoop dance school in Canada. The school now has five certified teachers and five performers and has had over 200 students. In 2010/2011 Rebecca was hired to work for Choreographer Danièle Desnoyers and leCarré des Lombes, to coach two dancers to become expert hula hoopers for the piece Dévorer le ciel (2010).

As choreographer Rebecca was the first in Montreal to use hula hoops in a contemporary dance piece in her creation Pi.r.squared (2007) presented at Espace Tangente. As a dancer Rebecca has worked with choreographer Soo Yeon Cho under the direction of Sha Xin Wei at Hexagram in the OUIJA project (2007), she danced for Choreographer Sasha Kleinplatz in the creation and presentation of Bruised Knee Chorus (2008), and she was choreographer Gabriel Martin's collaborator in the creation of the duet Box (2009). In the summer of 2010 Rebecca worked with a creative team in Taiwan to create a multi-disciplinary performance choreography that was presented to aboriginal communities around Taiwan. She is currently working as a dancer with several sound artists and programmers in Montreal & Berlin on a mapping tool for choreographers.

Rebecca has been very active in the Montreal arts community over the past five years. She has worked in collaboration with Festivals des Film du Monde and Festival International des Films sur l'Art to organize happenings in Montreal including a Flash Mob in Place des Arts (2011), and a Hoop Jam in Place des Festivals (2010). She has participated in projects for International Day of Dance, Nuit Blanche, Festival International du Jazz and has been an RQD member since 2009.

Rebecca is very interested in the idea of leaving an imprint. Her choreographic intention is to create flowing movement while executing highly technical tricks using hoops. She aims to bring people into a whole world, away from their own reality through the creation of a unique atmosphere composed of sound, light and movement where the viewer's perspective and sense of time are altered.

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