Plastic Circles is a short ethnographic documentary that follows two Chicago-based hoop dancers; Coelti, a professional hoop dancer and Kelsey Rae Miles, a new comer to hoop dance, through the relationships formed from their personal journeys with a seemingly juvenile toy – a hula hoop. While otherwise strangers, hoop dance has impacted both their lives and has encouraged their paths to cross and intertwine, creating a blossoming friendship between the two. Through the primal human desire to belong and to be accepted, Plastic Circles explores the love, community, and friendships created through hoop dance and how these concepts of kinship contribute to the individual quest for self-actualization and exploration through a dancer’s relationship to their prop.

Directed, shot, and edited by Angela Verish.