The Hop Hoop thread

In a show called Desir Melbourne's Marawa Ibrahim, 26, specialises in hooping — as in twirling a hula hoop around the waist, and she can have a dozen or more orbiting her. In a just over a week she's become a magnet for what turns out to be an ardent community of hoop enthusiasts in America.

She's a multi-tasking dynamo and, in the show, she often spins hoops as she saunters around her domain, an ornate circular performance tent at the end of a pier in Lower Manhattan.

Marawa graduated from Melbourne's National Institute for Circus Arts in 2004, and now great reviews and sold-out performances have put her dangerously close to overnight sensation status.

"One main thing struck me about Marawa when I first saw her perform in a student production in Melbourne," says Ross Mollison, the Australian-born producer of Desir, and the main brains behind the late summer performance precinct that houses the show on the pier.

"It was that she was not only a gifted hoop artist, but she had this incredible stage presence — and that's not always a quality that is easy to radiate in the circus."

The eyelashes were still in place, accentuated with vivid green eyeliner when Marawa — she's prefers the Cher/Madonna single-word stage name — and I met recently in the open-air bar that's part of the performance complex straddling the East River.

"The inspiration was Josephine Baker, the African-American singer and performer who went to Paris and pretty much took the place by storm," Marawa said. "I mean, we use one of Josephine's signature numbers, Don't you Touch my Tomatoes, as a kind of theme song for her in the show.

"It's as suggestive as it sounds so I'm glad my dad isn't here to see it."

In fact, Marawa spends much of her time on the tiny round stage of the Spiegeltent in a replica of the scandalous "Banana Dress" that Baker performed in around 1926.