Cindy Naughton, an employee of the Smith Campus School, teaches a course on Native American music. Each semester she shows her students a video featuring traditional dances.

When Naughton learned that Cliff Matias, an award-winning Native American performer, would be demonstrating Hoop Dancing at the New Africa House’s Augusta Savage Gallery, she jumped at the chance to witness one of her favorite dances live.

Last night, she and her son Tom joined a capacity crowd at the Gallery to watch Matias and his partner, Jason Gullo, perform both traditional and contemporary rituals.

Matias and Gullo, educators with New York City-based Lotus Music and Dance, began their performance by explaining that the traditions in which they were participating were not specific to any Indian ethnicity.

“We’re sharing with you contemporary Native American dance,” said Matias. “There’s no real nation it would come from.”

He explained that there are common elements to nearly all Native American dances, such as drumming.

“The drum represents the earth, our great mother,” Matias said. “The beating of a drum sounds like the beating of a heart.”

He demonstrated typical drumbeats, all of which imitated heartbeats. He then broke into an aggressive, war-like thumping familiar to all in the audience from countless Westerns and cartoons.

“This means nothing to us,” said Matias. “Whose heartbeat sounds like this? If your heartbeat sounds like this, I know a really good cardiologist for you.”

Matias and Gullo picked volunteers from the audience, who participated in common, social dances such as the Smoke Dance, and the Buffalo Dance. At one point, Matias asked for a female volunteer “without a boyfriend”, and played a traditional love song for her on a Native American flute.

The finale of the evening was the “Hoop Dance”, in which Matias danced with five multi-colored hoops, forming intricate patterns in the shapes of various animals, including birds, snakes and mice.

“There aren’t a lot of dancers who tell stories with their hoops today,” he said. “There are maybe 300 of us.”

Matias’s performance was met with enthusiastic applause from the crowd.

“I loved how Cliff incorporated his personal experience with the universal Native American experience,” said Amy Corey, the Augusta Savage Gallery Manager. “He related to the audience in a way that everyone seemed to enjoy.”

Matias says that he hopes that attendees of his performances “get a better understanding of Native American culture and music.

“We don’t do a lot of history – we concentrate on culture,” he said. “Maybe we can break some stereotypes.”

Naughton, who said she enjoyed the show immensely, hopes that Matias and Gullo’s lesson is not lost on her son.

“I hope he gets an appreciation for this wonderful art form,” she said. “I hope [this performance] counters some of the stereotypical ‘bad guy’ images of Native Americans that he might get from other sources.”