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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Fire eaters, belly dancers gather for annual symposium

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Flow artists twirled hula hoops, belly-danced and ate fire at the annual FlowMotion Symposium this weekend.

Put on by FlowMotion, a local flow arts group, the symposium offered a variety of classes and showcases demonstrating the unique activities of the flow arts at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel and other venues Friday through Sunday.

The flow arts combine many different types of movement and include dance, fire spinning, juggling and object manipulation. Volunteer and symposium attendee Ava Welch said the objective of these types of activities is to achieve the mental state of flow.

“Athletes talk about it, where you aren’t really thinking about what you’re doing and it’s just one thing to the next to the next,” she said. “It’s just all these different props and disciplines you can learn. It’s like everything you’ve ever heard of, plus a bunch of stuff you never knew existed.”

Welch said most of the symposium’s workers are volunteers, like herself. She began to get involved in the flow arts through hula-hooping about two years ago and said she is enjoying seeing the community grow through events like the symposium.

“It’s largely about bringing people who want to learn in contact with instructors who want to teach and building the community as a whole,” she said. “It’s a big community-building thing.”

IU student and member of the IU Flow Club Tara Lawrence attended the symposium last year and said it has grown since then.

“There are so many more classes, and I know that they just have reached out to a larger region base,” she said. “And there are so many more people who I think have traveled to come in. There are a lot of formats for the classes, which is so awesome and it’s very exciting to see it grow.”

In addition to classes, the symposium offered nightly showcases of flow artists, as well as DJ sets and fire circles. Volunteer and attendee Cherie Dawn Haas said it is her first time at the FlowMotion symposium, but she has attended other events like this in the past.

“It’s like a mini getaway weekend where I can really unplug from all the daily stresses, and I think that’s part of what flow is about,” she said. “It helps you to really get in tune with something higher.”

As a flow arts advocate and enthusiast, Haas is the author of “Girl on Fire,” a novel about the flow arts. Although Haas said flow art symposiums usually take place outside, the change of location has not hindered her experience.

“Everybody has been so friendly here,” she said. “The whole town actually has been so friendly. I felt like the energy that we brought and are brining all weekend, it’s just going to expand into this very business environment.”

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