Anah Hoopalicious Reichenbach

Anah Reichenbach, known professionally as Hoopalicious, is a pioneer of the modern hoop-dance movement who transformed the hoop from a novelty toy into a vehicle for improvisational dance and flow-arts practice. Beginning in the late 1990s, Reichenbach developed a distinctive approach that combined continuous waist and torso rotation with off-body manipulation, traveling steps, jumps, and club-dance musicality. She also designed larger adult-sized hoops whose slower rotation and greater momentum made sustained movement and learning more accessible than the small toy hoops of earlier decades.

By 2004, Reichenbach's performance had reached stadium audiences through projections during Sting's *Sacred Love* tour. A 2006 *Los Angeles Times* profile documented her teaching beginner hoop dance in North Hollywood and organizing "hoop-downs" at Burning Man, placing her at the intersection of festival culture, commercial entertainment, and movement education during modern hooping's early expansion.

Reichenbach's teaching treated the hoop as a partner and compositional constraint. Her *Hoop Revolution* instructional materials, released in 2013, broke movement into on-body and off-body pathways while encouraging improvisation and personal style. She appeared in Amy Goldstein's documentary *The Hooping Life*, which premiered in 2010 and traced the women-led subculture of contemporary hooping. Later instructor-training programs extended her pedagogical approach through certified mentors, helping establish classes beyond her own performances.

Throughout the 2010s and into the present, Reichenbach has continued to offer Hoopalicious-style HoopDance sessions and identifies her work as part of the modern hoop-dance pioneering generation. Her contribution lies not in inventing hoop dance in every cultural or historical sense—Indigenous North American hoop-dance traditions, rhythmic-gymnastics apparatus work, and circus ring manipulation have distinct lineages—but in helping build a repeatable culture around contemporary hooping: adapted equipment, public jams, teachable vocabulary, filmed documentation, and instructor development.