OSWEGO – Locally, Camp Hollis in Oswego is known as a summer camp for Oswego County kids that can be booked for the occasional reunion or wedding.
But this week, the waterfront campground on Lake Ontario is the destination for dozens of practitioners, instructors and learners of Rope Dart, an ancient Chinese martial art that’s become a modern form of performance, exercise and sport – including the daredevil pursuit of “spinning fire,” twirling objects set aflame for spectacular nighttime light shows.
The second annual Dart Arts gathering opens at Camp Hollis noon Thursday, Oct. 10, with a rope dart painting ceremony, continues for three days of classes, workshops, games and shows, and culminates with Saturday evening’s Rope Dart Gala of performance art starting at 6:30 p.m., with fire spinning beginning at 8 p.m.
The event is drawing rope “dartists” from around the world and is free to attend. It’s the work of Cassidy Barney of Oswego, who discovered rope dart in 2015 and has become a well-known instructor known as “Cass Cradles” in the rope dart community.
Barney, 31, organized the first Dart Arts gathering at Camp Hollis last year, spending $2,500 out of pocket to rent the campground for a weekend and offer bunks in its 12 cabins free to any rope dartist who wanted to participate.
His inaugural event attracted 55 people, 50 of them rope dartists who loved it so much, they held a Go Fund Me that raised $3,500 to hold it again this year and add an extra day, Thursday, to accommodate more workshops and performance-sharing.
Barney said he expects about 100 people to participate this year — about the total number Camp Hollis’s cabins can sleep. But he said people may also tent camp on the grounds, show up for the day or just attend a specific workshop or performance.
Barney, the elder son of Neil Barney Jr. and the late Dee Barney of Oswego, is a born performer who gravitated toward Tolkien and all things medieval as a child. At age 9 or 10, he took up two activities that set him up for rope dart, he said — taking classes in Okinawan karate and practicing skateboarding tricks for hours on end.
As a teen, he saw Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 movie “Kill Bill” and was fascinated with the rope dart employed by the character Gogo Yubari, which reminded him of the spiked chain mace used by medieval knights.
“At the time, I thought it was just a movie thing,” he said. “Then I found out it was real” through a martial arts friend from Thailand who was learning rope dart.
Barney learned that it originated 3,000 years ago in China as a martial arts weapon consisting of 10 to 12 feet of rope attached to a heavy, pointed metal dart that an assailant could fling at an opponent, potentially doing serious damage, and pull back quickly to strike again.
He also learned it was making a comeback as a “flow art” like juggling, hula hoop, interpretive dance and Vinyasa yoga, thanks largely to the Rope Dart Academy, a school and rope dart purveyor founded in 2006 by rope dart guru Frank Hatsis.
Barney was 22 and about to embark on a long-imagined adventure of skateboarding across the U.S., which he accomplished from late May to mid-August of 2015, skateboarding through 12 states, camping at night or staying with friends new and old and sharing YouTube videos documenting his trip.
Among the 60 pounds of camping gear and supplies he carried in a backpack for the journey was a length of rope with a padlock on the end, his first, handmade rope dart.
By the end of his quest, he was pretty good at twirling the padlock – which he said is a far more dangerous weapon than the beanbag or rubber rope darts you can buy online for $25.
“It’s the cheapest hobby I’ve ever done,” he said. “Anyone can do it.”
He joined a Facebook group called Rope Dart Tech that had 3,000 members then and nearly 10,000 now, took Rope Dart Academy classes and began devising his own rope dart tricks and throws using a technique he calls “cradling” – hence Cass Cradles – loosely based on the string game Cat’s Cradle.
He describes it as “performing an illusion of maneuvering the rope so it looks like it’s tangled, but it’s really ready to be released whenever you like,” often after wrapping around an arm, leg, neck or multiple body parts before a quick turn and release unwraps it at high velocity.
Barney now has more than 100 rope dart tutorials on his YouTube and has been an instructor at flow arts festivals around the country, including Kinetic Fire, a fire-spinning retreat held each May in College Corner, Ohio.
He said most such gatherings and retreats welcome all sorts of flow arts practitioners, with rope dart making up a fraction of the activities. He got the idea to create an event centered on rope dart while riding his one-wheel electric skateboard to Camp Hollis last summer.
“I thought, ‘I wonder how much it would cost to rent this place out and have a rope dart gathering?’” he said.
This year, he has rope darters coming from as far as Australia, Belgium and California, he said. Camp Hollis’ cafeteria has refrigerators and microwaves available, and JD’s Kitchen will have its food truck on site throughout the event.
Barney said the size of the venue may limit how big it can get and how long it can be free to attend, but he hopes to grow his gathering into an annual festival for rope darters and people interested in seeing what they do.
His goal for rope dart as a sport is bigger: “That it hopefully turns into what skateboarding was in the 1980s,” he said. “It started out as a niche thing that became a cultural trend, turned into a popular activity and became an Olympic sport.”
See the schedule of events for the Dart Arts gathering at Camp Hollis, Oswego, on Facebook at Dart Arts 2024.
https://www.facebook.com/events/camp-hollis/dart-arts-2024/2678176845685637/
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