What is the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest?
A dancer walks onto a stage with a stack of hoops the size of dinner plates, the drum starts, and within a minute the hoops have become an eagle, then a butterfly, then a globe spinning around a body that never stops moving. Judges score it. That is hoop dance as a sport, and the only world championship of it happens on the grounds of the Heard Museum on Central Avenue in Phoenix, one weekend each February.
The World Championship Hoop Dance Contest draws more than 100 dancers from the United States and Canada into five divisions: Tiny Tots (5 and under), Youth (6–12), Teen (13–17), Adult (18–39) and Senior (40 and over). Each dances to a drum group, using anywhere from four hoops to fifty, and is scored one to ten on precision, timing and rhythm, showmanship, creativeness and speed. The adult champion is the world champion. Prize money across the divisions totals $25,000. The 2026 contest, the 36th, ran February 14–15; Josiah Enriquez, Navajo and from the Isleta and Pojoaque pueblos of New Mexico, kept the adult title by two points for his third straight year, the first three-peat since Arizona’s Derrick Suwaima Davis in 1996–98. The 37th is set for February 6–7, 2027, 9 to 5 each day.
The contest began in 1991 at the New Mexico State Fair, created by Ralph Zotigh, the fair’s Indian Village entertainment director, and his son Dennis. The Heard took it over for the second championship and has hosted it ever since, which is why a dance form that started as a 1930s tourist performance by Tony White Cloud of Jemez Pueblo now has an annual world title, a hall of champions and a crowd of thousands on a museum lawn. Adult admission was $26 in 2026 and includes the galleries. It is 25 minutes from Old Town and the best spectator event on the Valley’s Native calendar in February.
How to watch it
Which day. Saturday is the fuller day: all five divisions dance preliminaries, the tiny tots open the morning and the crowd is biggest. Sunday builds to the adult final heat in the afternoon, when the top dancers from Saturday’s rounds go again for the title. If you can only do one, Sunday afternoon is the championship; if you want the whole range of the form, from a four-year-old with two hoops to a senior with thirty, come Saturday.
Seating. The stage sits on the museum’s lawn with the audience on the grass and in a limited number of chairs. Arrive when gates open at 9, bring a low chair or a blanket, and sit with the sun behind you; the February sun in Phoenix is strong by 11 and the day runs to 5. Shade along the edges goes first.
Getting there. From Old Town, Camelback or Indian School west to Central Avenue and south, about 25 minutes; the museum is at 2301 N Central. Parking around the museum fills by mid-morning on both days, and the museum points visitors to the Valley Metro light rail, whose Encanto/Central stop is at the door. Park at a station on Central or Camelback and ride.
Tickets. The Heard sells timed general admission online from January, $26 for adults in 2026, and it includes the museum, so plan an hour inside during the lunch lull. Buy ahead; the contest has sold heavily in recent years and 2026 organizers expected about 7,000 spectators.
Behaving. This is a competition judged by elders of the form, and the dancers are concentrating. Applaud freely, but stay off the arena and the paths the dancers use, keep flash photography off, and ask before photographing anyone up close. Many dancers and their families are at the vendor booths between rounds, and they will talk about the form if you ask.
Eat and shop. Food vendors on the grounds sell frybread, Navajo tacos and the rest; the lines are shortest during the teen division. The vendor booths and the museum shop sell work by Native artists, and the shop labels maker and tribe on everything. Read our note on buying Native American art before you spend.
From a tourist act to a world title
Hoop dance in its modern form is credited to Tony White Cloud, a Jemez Pueblo dancer who in the 1930s began performing with several willow hoops at once, forming shapes with them as he moved, for tourist audiences. Other dancers took it up and expanded it, and by the 1980s it was a familiar exhibition piece on the powwow circuit, admired but never scored.
In 1991 Dennis Zotigh, a dancer and historian whose father Ralph ran entertainment for the New Mexico State Fair’s Indian Village, proposed a contest to find out, as he put it, who was the best of the best. He borrowed the Olympic one-to-ten scale and set five categories so that a dancer using four hoops to a fast song and a dancer using twenty to a slow one could be judged against each other. Eighteen dancers entered. Eddie Swimmer, Cherokee from North Carolina, won. Late that year Zotigh pitched the idea to the Heard, which agreed to host the second championship, named for White Cloud, with new age divisions and a panel of regional judges. Quentin Pipestem of the Tsuu T’ina Nation in Alberta won the adult title, and the contest has not left Central Avenue since, apart from the online edition of 2021. The Heard’s own materials date its hosting from 1991; the founders’ account and most histories place the first Phoenix contest in 1992. Either way, the Heard made it permanent.
The record book belongs to Arizona. Derrick Suwaima Davis won seven adult titles between 1994 and 2014, three of them in a row. Nakotah LaRance, Tony Duncan and the Sixkiller Sinquah family have carried the title since, and Josiah Enriquez’s three straight wins from 2024 to 2026 are the first run to match Davis’s. The field now passes a hundred dancers a year, and the youth and teen divisions are where the next champions are visible years in advance.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale has staged Native performance for a winter audience for decades, from Native Trails at the Civic Center in the 2000s to the tribal-run Arizona Indian Festival each February. The hoop dance contest is a different thing: not a presentation to visitors but a championship among Native dancers, judged by their own, that happens to be open to anyone with a ticket. In that it resembles the Red Mountain Eagle Powwow across Pima Road each November, and it asks the same of a visitor: watch, applaud, do not interfere. It lands in the same February as the Arizona Indian Festival and the Phoenix Open, 25 minutes from Old Town. Spend one of those Saturdays on the Heard’s lawn, and come back Sunday afternoon for the final heat if you can.