it is wednesday and summer and my hands are numb from putting colorful electrical tape around the hula hoops i made from irrigation tubing and plumbing connector.  

i am a toy maker, a summertime elf.

at artscape i just showed up with my hoops (about 40) and put them down on a grassy median strip in front of MICA main building, and the people hooped like the strip was a human magnet for three dayz.

many of my theories were corroborated over the course of three dayz of public, uninvited, and illegal hoop slinging

“this is the best exhibit at artscape” commented a dozen or more people.  ahh, but this is not even sanctioned, ha, which proves that the best stuff might be something subversive, something that appears to just be an “exhibit” or “kids stuff”

recently a man named augusto boal passed, he was a brazilian man who dedicated his life to the theater.  but he had a theory that theater was originally, in the dayz of prehistoric campfires, a powerful social ritual where everyone could play a part, a group therapy if you will around skits and the imagination.  when kings and queens got a hold of it, though, and realized how powerful the suspension of disbelief can be, they took the theater from the hands of the people and made them spectators.

this kind of thinking allowed for indoctrination and control of the masses throughout written history in such a manner that it seemed not like oppression but more like high art but

low art has always rebelled against kings and queens

with augusto boal, a new theater of the oppressed was articulated and in practice this new theater attempted to eliminate the spectator.  that is my goal with hula hoops.  they act as a theater of the oppressed, switching the lens of the spectator, requiring the embrace of “being the spectacle.”

sneaky little elves…