Nakotah Larance

Nakotah Lomasohu Raymond LaRance was a Hopi Nation citizen born on August 23, 1989, in Barrow, Alaska, now known as Utqiaġvik. His family connected him to Tewa, Navajo, Hopi, and Assiniboine communities. He began dancing in early childhood, first as a fancy dancer, and was introduced to hoop dance by Derrick Suwaima Davis, who made his first hoops. LaRance grew up competing in the Heard Museum's World Championship Hoop Dance Contest, progressing from youth and teen divisions to become an adult champion in 2015, 2016, and 2018. In hoop dance, performers remain in time with live singers and drummers while manipulating multiple hoops into linked formations—birds, flowers, wings, spheres, and other images—so speed and technical control serve story and meaning.

At age twenty in 2009, LaRance joined Cirque du Soleil as a principal hoop dancer, touring internationally for more than three years and appearing in *TOTEM*. The large-scale circus context amplified his speed, stagecraft, and image-making while keeping the form's Native origins present. He also appeared on *The Tonight Show with Jay Leno* and acted on screen.

LaRance developed a recognizable contemporary performance voice by incorporating popping, waving, gliding, mime, and other hip-hop-inflected actions around the hoop dance's continuous rhythm and transformations. This fusion made the form legible to new audiences while remaining accountable to traditional teachings, history, live music, and respect for earlier dancers. After his Cirque years, he returned to northern New Mexico and invested heavily in youth, teaching at the Lightning Boy Foundation and helping develop Pueblo youth hoop dancers. State cultural officials credit him with helping return and expand hoop dance in New Mexico, where hundreds of participants now engage the form. His mentorship welcomed other families and teachers so students would encounter multiple styles and lineages.

LaRance died on July 12, 2020, at age thirty following an accidental fall in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. His influence continues through the dancers he taught and the Nakotah LaRance Memorial Youth Hoop Dance Championship, organized with the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture and Lightning Boy Foundation. That memorial centers the value he placed on youth transmission, making competition a site of education, cultural relationship, and future leadership.