SnapShot Press Release: HOOPS [adorning Culture through performative social commentary]

Culture [big C] is nuanced.

The ability to make note of who you are, from ancestral ties to locality, is not just about your dialect & diction, or hair texture & melanin percentage. Culture [again, big C] lives in the trenches of human experience, expression, and visual dialogue. It is an aesthetic that breathes. It is the evolution of tradition. 

Ashley Oviedo, Paulina Lule, and Celia Mandela Rivera

Saturday's [March 11th, 2023] world premier of HOOPS, by Eliana Pipes with original music by B~Free based on The HOOPS Project by Nicole Acosta, was an opus of social commentary that other narratives of Culture have never really grappled with. . . well, at least until now. Its unapologetic portrayal of Hoop earrings as a legacy adornment spoke to the range of existence that is tied to these magical objects that hang from one's earlobe like an extension of their souls. 

The three women stage performance staring Paulina Lule, Ashley Oviedo, and Celia Mandela Rivera at The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, was a reflection of many anecdotal experiences, all centered around “Hoops”. Stories of joy, identity, trauma, and triumph were threaded with odes to WOMEN OF COLOR [non-caucasian]. Yes, that’s right! The women who have historically been represented on the periphery of civility, modernism, and the origins of “fashion” were celebrated for their continued contribution to society and the burden of that placement.

The setting composed of Acosta’s original portraits, brilliantly curated into a collage of women in their hoops, and B~Free’s music compositions filled the room with the vibiest of vibes, notes of nostalgia, and homage to #AllThingsUrban allowed us to live in the quirk, theatrics, and intimate monologues of truths not heard enough. Where the active ornamentation of Costume Stylist, Kyndal Johnson, kept us focused on the use of hoops as more than just an ear accessory, but an amulet that can be used to adorn, a bookbag, a jacket, vest, practically any thing it can cling to as a sign of protection, strength, vulnerability, and power.

If heavy is the head that wears the crown, heavier is the ear that wears the Hoops. However, this artistic collaboration of transformative media is rooted in qualitative research, backed by anthropology [Listen, when the old school projector with the transparency papers came out, I died], and even imaginative science made an appearance [now “Bull Sh*t catchers” is my new favorite synonym for my Hoops]. But let’s be clear, those strategic pulls at validating Hoops as a valuable artifact in one's human existence, in the grand scheme of things was not for our door knocker loving, 3 for 15 [or 3 for 5 depending where you’re at] buying, “it’s all gold for me”, and our “bigger the better” peers. If the ethnographic researcher in me is right, this soft posturing was meant to inform our appropriating counter parts, unassuming haters, and the systemic inequity followers about how these adornments are apart of series of intersectionalities that are only controversial when not adorned by a “Barbie”. [Yall, know what a Barbie is. Don’t flinch at reality].

As a person, who wears earrings religiously [like, leaving home without them is a sin for me LOL], I resonated with the performance as a notation that I too exist within this nuance of Culture, a sisterhood of sorts that is passed on like DNA, or inherited like a family heirloom.

So today I challenge you to wear your hoops as a note to the revolutionary identities of women.

¡Eso es Cultura Baby! [with a big C, and don’t you ever forget it].

Lexi S. Brunson for /CW