When she was attending high school in the Netherlands, Lisa Lottie was made to take a computerized test to find out what kind of profession she should pursue as an adult. The results were straightforward: She would be pastry chef, a baker or a jam-maker.

On Sunday afternoon, in the Osterhout Concert Theater at Binghamton University, Lottie took to the stage with four color-changing LED hula-hoops and put on a performance that had the crowd on its feet.

Her path from the school just outside Amsterdam to stages and street corners around the world where she performs with her hula-hoops was the center of her TEDx presentation, entitled “My Weapon of Choice.”

“I didn’t want to dedicate my school years to the preservation of fruit,” she said. “And I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I really felt like that should be okay.”

However, when she failed to choose a vocation, Lottie was placed in classes that were not yet full.

“I spent my days behind my desk being bored, uninterested and completely under stimulated,” she said. “And it wasn’t more than just a couple of years after that that I left school unimpressed, pretty uneducated — and also — without graduating.”

Lottie said she felt like there was nothing in her life that she was good at — by the time she was 20 years old, she had held at least 12 different jobs. She decided that it was time to find something she was passionate about and pursue it.

It turned out to be easier said than done. She felt that her perceived lack of talent was always hovering over her.

“I was really good at folding towels, I was really good at screwing caps onto tubes of tooth paste, but I kinda didn’t feel like those skills were going to help me find a job that I was going to jump out of bed for in the morning,” Lottie said.

But when she turned 21, a friend handed Lottie a green, adult-sized hula-hoop. She wasn’t very good at first — having no natural sense of coordination or balance — but when she was hooping, she found that there was “nothing else in the world that [she] felt like [she] should be doing.”

Soon after, Lottie quit her job to join the circus.

“I went from selling soap in a cosmetic shop full time to sleeping two tents away from the elephants and performing 21 shows a week under a 5,000-seater big top in India,” she said. “I got paid almost no money, I hula-hooped my way through countless episodes of dysentery, but I loved to perform and I loved India and I ended up staying in India for 2 years.”

After India, Lottie elected to take her talents back to Europe. But she found that in order to be able to keep up with other professional circus performers — and also put food on the table — she would have to hone her skills on the streets.

“I had to convince every single person walking by that they should stop and watch my act,” she explained. “I’d give them my best tricks, try to win them over and I’d try to do everything I could to make sure they gave me some money before they left.”

She said that the experience of starting with nothing and ending up with a group of people clapping and cheering was extremely special.

“To successfully pull off a street show, it felt like pure magic,” Lottie said.

However, there were difficulties, too. Lottie recounted competing with other performers for space, meeting and hanging out with drug addicts and the homeless as well as an incident in which she witnessed one human statue performer throw a brick at another performer who had the same costume as him — the victim later died.

But Lottie had discovered her passion and would not be deterred.

“I found a type of freedom in my work which motivated me more than anything,” she said. “I would jump out of bed in the morning not because I had to, but because I wanted to.”

Lottie was quick to insist that it was hard work, not raw talent, that has contributed to her successful hula hooping career — her YouTube videos have millions of views and she is an in-demand performer at venues all over the world.

Instead, Lottie implored the audience to search for their passions and work to give them meaning.

“In the end, does it matter if you make money doing the thing you love or if you make money so that you can do the thing you love?” she asked. “It’s a personal preference, but what I think matters the most is that we find the thing that we love the most and that we give ourselves a purpose in life by being captivated by these passions — whatever they may be.”

Pipe Dream got the chance to sit down with Lottie before her talk

Pipe Dream: When did you realize that you wanted to pursue a nontraditional career path and go into the performing arts?

Lisa Lottie: That was only when I was 21 years old, which is really quite late because most performing artists make that decision at a very young age or they get born into a family where that’s already kinda decided for them.

PD: So up until 21, what was the plan?

LL: That’s the thing, I had no plan. I didn’t have anything that I liked to do. I didn’t have any major passions so I just tried a lot of things. I didn’t have a real excitement for life because I didn’t have a focus that was important enough for me to work towards. And that’s kinda what my talk is about: that it doesn’t really matter what you want to focus your life on, just that it is important to find something. It can be weird, like hula-hooping — which is a totally crazy career path — but if it’s something that you love enough you can make it a career.

PD: What sort of reaction did you get from friends and family when you decided that you wanted to be a performer?

LL: Well my mom was really used to me trying a lot of things and she was used to me quitting a lot of things, so she was just like “OK, whatever.” And then, of course, it stuck around and became a really big deal. And now she’s really proud of me.

PD: Is there a difference between performing on a stage and street performing?

LL: Yes! Hugely different. It’s so different; it’s like a different world!

PD: But you do both?

LL: I do both, yeah. Probably equal parts of both, actually. The thing is, when you’re performing in front of an audience they’re there because they want to see a performance. So they are prepared for what’s coming, which means that you can get away with a lot more things, you know? You can really take more time, you can make certain suspensions in your act. They’re already there and they’ve already paid for their ticket.

That’s a very different environment from being on the street where you have to convince people that they should stay and watch you. And the people who are there aren’t there to see a performance, they’re there to do shopping or they’re going to get a paper — they can be there for any reason. It’s a completely different world; you can’t compare them.

You could have the most amazing circus artist in the world and you could put him on the street and he could suck, he could suck ass because he doesn’t know how to deal with that environment. And the other way around you could put the most amazing street performer in the world — he would totally mesmerize you and blow your mind — on the stage, and he could suck because he needs that spontaneity and he needs things to happen around him that he can play with.

PD: You’ve obviously had a lot of success in your career thus far. Why do you keep doing street performances if you can book big, sold-out stage performances?

LL: That’s a good question. It’s because there isn’t really anything like [street performing]. It’s so special in it’s own kind. What I really love about street performing is the honesty of it. When you do big stage shows and, you know, when you perform for people who are very trained and know when they should clap and everything is fabulous, it’s different. Sometimes people who you perform for are very rich; they’re going to go to the theater and they’re going to see the show because that’s what they do, and they’re going to have an amazing meal beforehand. It can become quite an exclusive group that you’re performing for.

In the street, you perform for everyone. You perform for children, you perform for families, you perform for people who won’t have money to ever go to a theater, you know? They might not know that there’s anything like that out there. I really like that non-exclusivity, that all-encompassing “This is what I do and I want everybody to experience it.” And that, in my experience, that changes audiences’ lives way more than in the theater.

Not that many people in the theater will see something and go “That’s what I want to do” or “Oh my god, I’m going to go and do gymnastics and learn a handstand” — it happens, but not that much. Whereas, in the street, you can get up close and personal with people. And I love that, having somebody come up to me right after my show to tell me “That was amazing, I saw you here last year. I have a hula-hoop now and I’ve been hula-hooping for the last year.” It really touches me. I love performing on the stage, as well, but I love coming back to the street. It gives me reality and I think that’s great.

PD: What does hula-hooping mean to you?

LL: I think it’s an incredible tool to start playing around with, even if you can’t do anything, even if you’re not a physical person and have no coordination. It’s so easy for everybody to pick it up and just try it. I used to have no life goals and be quite an insecure person. When I picked up the hula-hoop for the first time, I was like “I can’t really do this, it’s not for me. You probably need to have a lot of coordination to do something like this.” And then I kinda proved myself completely wrong. I think that’s what it means to me. It does prove to me that you can do anything as long as you put your mind to it. I see that with a lot of people who love to hula-hoop. For some reason, in the last 10 years it has changed a lot of people’s lives for the better. And it has a lot to do with just getting up and moving.¶