Fire Dance Transcript
- [Woman] When I first saw fire performing my first thought was that it was so very, very beautiful.
- [June] I really got into it by watching other people doing it and said, wow, that's beautiful, that's amazing. I have to know how to do that 'cause it looks like so much fun.
- [Lisa] I saw it at the Oregon Country Fair. I was very much inspired and when the fair was over I went home and taught myself how.
- I was traveling in India and I saw it done by a friend of mine from Holland and I pretty much attacked her and told her that she needed to teach me how to do it.
- I was going to raves a lot with my friends and I saw people swinging glow sticks around on strings and so I was like, hey, that's kind of cool. Tried it, hit myself a lot in the head and eventually got good at that. Then I came to Oregon and I was at an outdoor rave and I saw someone doing fire and I asked if I could try it and he was pretty nice so he let me do it and I didn't kill myself.
- I first saw fire performance in 1998 at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada and from that point on I knew that it was something that I just had to learn.
- Since I was learning how to fire dance by myself and I didn't have anybody around who was already a fire dancer, I didn't know what I was doing and so basically everything that I did was something new.
- When I first started practicing, I went to the internet and would print out each page of one move and then I'd sit it down in front of me and I'd read it and I'd try the move and I'd read it, okay, this is it. So then I'd go upstairs and I'd print out another page of the next move and I would just do this.
- In my search for learning fire performance, I met a man named John and he offered to teach me. We started with fire eating. John as my teacher believed that if you can't put fire in your mouth then you shouldn't be playing with it.
- I think my reaction the first time I lit up is pretty much the reaction I have every time I light up, which is to have this enormous grin from ear to ear.
- I had this conception in my mind that if I hit myself my entire body was just gonna burst into flames and I was just gonna roast right there on the spot.
- I had been practicing for a week without them lit. I took a friend of mine down to Magnuson Park, found a big empty spot in the asphalt out there in the parking lot and we had some towels that were wet and a fire extinguisher and we were just ready for me to light myself on fire and I just tried really simple stuff, but it was a rush. There's this sound of the fire going past your ears and it sounds like a jet engine and you're in the middle of it and you're just watching it go around going, wow, it's really fresh.
- I was really, really nervous, but it was strange. Once I started setting up all my fire safety stuff that I was told to do, it felt really natural to me. I felt like I'd done it a million times.
- [June] I feel completely absorbed. I'm not thinking about anything else. It's really the only time that I have all my energy focused in one place. I'm not thinking about work. I'm not thinking about what's going on around me, aside from the fact that there's fire going around me and I'm just looking at it and feeling my whole body move with it. It's a very wonderful focused feeling.
- I don't know what it's like for other people, but my eyes just kind of glaze over and you just have to feel your way through everything, because if you pay too much attention to what's going on, if you try and control it too much, then it gets out of control if you think about it too much.
- [Lisa] For me, I'm in this space where I could be in front of a million people and I don't really know it. It's kind of like once the flames light up, you're really focused and just fire.
- It's like being on a stage with stage lights just shining all around you. Really, nothing exists except you and the element.
- It brings you into that totally present now moment when there's nothing else and it doesn't matter where you are and it doesn't matter what else is going on. It's just you and the fire.
- Butterfly. Mexican weave. I think that everyone who's involved in any sort of fire performance art has different lingo and terminology for not only the tools, but the moves.
- I tend to call fire dancing poi, but people generally don't understand the reference and so I just say I swing fire around on chains and then they get the idea.
- Fire eating and fire breathing are more common because I think that they've been featured in circuses. Among popular culture and younger audiences right now I think that the fire chains are the most popular.
- I think everybody sort of feels their way through the fire toys until they find which one they love and they go with that.
- The origins of fire dancing, especially the way in which we do it, are sort of sketchy at best.
- [June] I've heard that it started in New Zealand. I remember going to the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii when I was a kid and watching some performers spin poi.
- Somehow I found out that it was called poi and then I found out that that was a Maori term and from there I've done a lot of research and there's actually books about poi swinging and other manipulation of implements that the Maori did.
- From what I can tell, people do it more because they saw people doing it and they don't really, I don't know many people that have been like formally trained or that know the origins really well or anything like that.
- Locally here in Seattle, I think some of the earliest fire twirling that we know about was in the mid to early '90s but is also very, very eclectic. I think that as the fire tools are developed, people borrow from what they know and pass that knowledge on to other people that are starting it for the first time. The groups of people that do it have sort of diverged into a few very distinct groups. There seems to be groups that do it solely for sort of a professional performance-oriented reason. There also seems to be a group that does fire performance as an entertainment, but it's more just sort of for fun and it's more casual. And then the last group is the beach fire spinners. These are people that just really wanna do it for themselves and want to do it for fun and do it on a very casual, open-minded basis.
- [Announcer] We are Circus Symbiotic and what that means to us is that we are an interactive group of people who create performance to inspire performance.
- We formed a troop just with a bunch of friends. We were mainly a fire troop that did other things, kind of created like ritualistic performances. We wanted our troop to be open for anybody that wanted to come and play with us and offer what they had to offer us. Everyone just kind of flowed with each other and supported the creative energy of it, too. And whatever just seemed to come out of people what they wanted to work towards or experience from that particular show, we would just play with. So when we would perform we would try to show people like this is what we're doing and we want you to feel something from it and then we want you to throw it back at us so it can create something else.
- [Announcer] I'm gonna ask everybody to breathe with this now in this final dance of fire.
- In the right elements you can feel the energy of your audience through the fire. If I feel like if your breath is right, and their breath is right and the elements are right, you can actually feel energy from other people.
- You're taking this very personal, very private, spiritual meditative experience and you're playing with that in front of an audience. Pele's Element is Delta Turley and myself and now we have our dedicated safety person, Kricket, so we are a crew of three. What we've tried to really focus on is the flow and being really graceful, really dancing with the fire. We try to play with speed, we try to play with levels, we try to really let it be a dance, rather than just boom, here we are and here's everything we know and now we're done. We do get a lot of of response when we'll do a movement where Delta and I are kind of interacting in each other's space. We trust each other, we've practiced that a lot. The audience doesn't necessarily even know what's coming and all of a sudden no longer are you just spinning fire around yourself but you're spinning it around someone else, as well, and I think that's the kind of thing that makes it a good show.
- The Anunnaki Project is our nonprofit arts organization that we founded here in Seattle. It actually began in 1997 before I was part of it with a group of street performance artists that decided to tell a myth using a performance and decided to invite their audience to be part of the performance.
- What we strive to do is to take a space that is very mundane and to transform it into a dreamscape that heralds back to when we were pro-human or whatever we were.
- We've spent a lot of time researching obscure myths from different cultures, whether Chinese mythology, Sumerian mythology, Teutonic mythology, you name it. We're just very interested in finding those myths and learning ways to demonstrate them to the common person who would otherwise never know these stories. We're trying to keep them alive through artistic expression.
- [John] We're trying to use these mythic images, sort of to poke away at something that is inherent in whatever makes us human.
- The Cabiri are what we affectionately refer to as the theatrical emissaries for the Anunnaki Project. The Cabiri are the dancers, stilt walkers, trapeze artists, fire performers that bring to life the mythology and stories and scripts that the Anunnaki Project creates. We use just about every fire tool, fire medium imaginable in our performances. We light the bottoms of our stilts on fire, we light our hats on fire, we put fire in our mouth, we spit fire out of our mouths, we spin it around our heads, we put it on our fingers, just about any sort of fire prop you can imagine. And we also use fire puppetry and fire sculpture, so you name it, we do it with fire.
- You can create fires and actually elemental character within the production and it becomes a thing into itself. At one level, it's a cathartic elemental deity, and at another level it's a gimmick. It depends if you're looking at this as a storyteller or if you're looking at it as a technician. When you're working on it as a technician you tend to look at it like you would look at it a hammer, but as a storyteller you look at it as a very sacred object that is representative of a transitory state.
- The rave scene in general is a pretty nice place because the worst thing that's gonna happen to you is people are gonna give you a big sweaty hug. It's really an encouraging atmosphere because if you're doing something neat, people are generally going to come up and be like, "Hey, what's your name? "You're pretty cool." A lot of times you see people with glow sticks and they're generally the people that want to be seen. I guess I do it for attention too. So you get shoelaces and glow sticks and because they're so much lighter you can move 'em a lot faster. With fire, you see the individual flaming contrails. With glow sticks, you can do it fast enough that it just turns into glowing ovoids. With fire, the chain is a lot heavier, so you have to move a lot more slowly. With the glow sticks, it's much, much faster, so you can do a lot of things at once and if you screw up, then they're a little more forgiving because they're not on fire and they're not heavy. With chains, you kind of get outta the way if something goes wrong. It is a dance. Just because it's not strict ballet or it's not merengue doesn't mean that it's any less people moving their bodies in specific ways towards specific ends that looks beautiful. It's dancing with props and it's beautiful when you see someone do it well and like any dance, it's kind of pitiful when you see someone doing it really badly.
- I kind of ended up doing safety pretty much by default. They need somebody to be able to be there for them and since I'm gonna be there anyways, it's pretty convenient that I be the one to do it. We, as fire safety, need to make sure that they know what they're supposed to be doing as performers, as well. I think the most important thing about being a safe fire dancer is making sure that you're sober enough to know what you're doing, what your equipment's doing, what the fire's doing, and what your audience is doing. So we should have a white bucket, we should all have a towel. The other important thing is making sure that you've got what equipment you would need in order to be safe, meaning you've got your white bucket with your water in it, you've got a white towel for cooling burns and for putting people out, making sure that your hair is tied up and not gonna catch on fire if you're doing stuff behind your back, making sure that the clothing that you have on isn't something that's gonna melt to your skin or automatically combust because you just put flame near it. Making sure that the fuels that you have are contained properly, making sure that you've got your fire source and your fuel source separated properly. It is an important aspect of fire dancing that everybody know how to perform fire safety, everybody know what the regulations are, everybody know what the equipment is and how to respond appropriately. So if a piece of equipment goes flying out into the audience, the dancer and the safety should both be there before it even hits the ground, as far as I'm concerned. You should be there. Also, an important aspect of safety is watching the fire dancer's faces. A lot of times you can see in the person's face whether or not they need you and communicate to the dancer. Let them know that you're there.
- One of the things that we do in promoting fire safety is we let people know what type of fuels are safe to burn.
- Kerosene, white gas and lamp oil are the most common ones that people seem to use.
- What you should use is white gas because it evaporates really quickly, and so if it hits you, your skin or your clothing or whatever, it won't burn long enough to get it hot enough to do damage. It'll just evaporate like that.
- So you need to just be really well-educated, and that's what I tell people. As long as it's not gasoline or something that's gonna actually explode, then it doesn't really matter what you're using, as long as it's appropriate for your equipment, your venue and you know enough about it to know what to expect.
- Because fire is a dangerous element and because we are putting not only ourselves but our audience at risk, we need to do it in a very professional manner. We need to work with the authorities that regulate fire as a public health risk and we need to be responsible.
- What I have here is all the essential items that you need to make a pair of poi. Well, that I need to make a pair of poi the way I do it.
- The most important thing as far as keeping an audience safe is to make sure that your tools are well constructed.
- When you're working with an element that has such a primary potency in the public eye as fire, then it can never fail. You have to produce equipment that is bulletproof. You have to create a device that is one with the body and is also indestructible.
- We're interested in equipment that's safe for us, that isn't gonna burn us or fall apart on us and we really feel like the best way to quality control that is to make our equipment ourselves.
- A lot of people have lately been ordering poi from juggling supply stores, juggling supply websites and I never realized that it was something that you could buy that was already manufactured, and so I just made 'em myself. To me, making something myself is a lot more valuable than just buying something that's pre-manufactured.
- People tend to buy their very first pair of chains and after that they realize they're expensive. There's ways to make 'em so they're less expensive, and also the Kevlar will only last a certain amount of time, so the idea is to go out and make your own.
- A lot of fire dancers don't have a lot of money. You kind of go with the cheapest way to make something or the best way to make something without going out and just buying it.
- We're going to clip these on there and you have your complete poi.
- Here in Seattle, the Golden Gardens Beach location is really a meeting place and sort of a kicking off place for a lot of people who wanna learn fire performance. During the summer, there might be as many as 15 or 20 people at a time down at the beach just practicing and sharing fuel and showing each other moves and they're generally off on their own sort of playing and experimenting.
- [John] If you go and you watch, you'll see that some people are out there just to teach people new tricks. There are some people out there who are just there to demonstrate the tricks they know.
- [Charly] It's become quite the hangout spot for fire twirling in the summer.
- I tracked down all the Portland performers I could find and invited them to come out and play with me. I called it poi in the park and I said come out and meet and play and share your ideas on Sunday from one to three at Laurelhurst Park. And the first time we had 10 people show up and it was great. I purposely go out of my way to meet people who are doing fire performance. I wanna make sure that they're aware of fire safety and I also want to share with them the resources that are available and let them know that they're not alone out there because it sort of feels like you are sometimes.
- Another reason that the community is so strong here is because of the community fire jams. A year ago on right around Thanksgiving, I just made a bunch of phone calls, pretty much everybody I knew who played with fire and I said, why don't you come on down and I found this great spot and let's all just jam out and play. And it's been meeting every single month since then.
- The first Sunday fire jam is so important to the community because we're not doing it for anybody else but ourselves. We're going out there, we're not charging. We don't put out a bucket for money. We get to all burn together. It's like a family.
- [Shireen] Fire dancers in general, we're an esoteric bunch, but you do find a lot of hippies and queers and folks who live in the underground kind of.
- You can't say that a fire performer is always female and you can't say that a fire performer is someone who's pagan or who is non-Christian or someone who lives an alternative lifestyle, because I'm a civil engineer. I know people who are research analysts, people who are waitresses and veterinarians and bartenders, people who are homeless, who don't have a job. People from all walks of life are fire performers.
- The majority of the dancers that I have seen tend to be women. They tend to be young women. That may just be because of the circles that I'm in. I find that there is a pretty obvious split that staff dancers tend to be men and the poi dancers tend to be women. It's not all the time, though.
- [Kricket] Fire dancers are very sensual beings and love to be sensual and I think that it's easier for women, generally speaking, than it is for men to connect with being sensual.
- It's also interesting because with the Maori tradition, whether people know it or not, the poi dancing was pretty much the only thing that was done only by women.
- [Kricket] People who are fire dancers are artists. Most fire dancers are also musicians or painters or sculptors. It's just another way for them to connect with their own artistic energy.
- [John] I've been playing with fire most of my life. I think everybody has.
- Probably any fire dancer you talk to was gonna tell you that, "Oh, I've always been attracted to fire." So, but that's pretty universal I would say for humans.
- I think a lot of people lack excitement. They've got school, they've got work, but it's why people go rock climbing, it's why people go kayaking, it's why people swing fire over their head. It's exciting.
- [June] The fear for me causes it to be more exciting.
- [Charly] The fear is an integral part of working with fire and I think that the moment I decide that I'm not afraid of it anymore is when I'm gonna get hurt.
- You can't be afraid of it. As soon as you start cringing, as soon as you think it's gonna hit you, then you set yourself up for disaster and that's the way life is. As soon as you start being afraid of living, then you set yourself up for disaster. You start hiding from the things that you love. You start hiding from the things that are exciting and you miss out.
- And there's always like the fine line between control and chaos with it. You have to be really in tune with your intuition. You have to learn how to trust it and listen and act accordingly because you'll learn that that's when the chaos comes in and that's when mistakes happen. That's when things you don't want to happen happen, is when you don't listen to your intuition.
- Fire is something you grow to love, something you admire, something that becomes a part of who you are.
- Fire is the element of change. Fire is the transformative element. Exposing yourself to fire will introduce change into your life.
- [June] It's something that's dangerous and it's something that's useful and it's warm and it's light and it cooks your food and you can take that power and hold it in your hand and do something with it that is also beautiful and an art form.
- It can become chaotic and it can become negative and you can take advantage of it and what it has to offer you.
- [Charly] Fire cannot be personified. Fire is not sexy. Fire is not mean. Fire is not angry. Fire is beautiful and fire is inhuman. I do feel that it is very alive and that it does have its own consciousness.
- Oh, it's primal. I mean it's one of the four elements that pretty much every culture has recognized throughout time.
- [Debra] There's a life and a death to it. As I'm spinning, I can see it going and burning out and I'm helping it along. I'm like killing it by swirling it faster or I'm giving it more life by just slowing it down and pausing. I have anywhere between three to 10 minutes with it and that's it, and then it's gone.
- Sometimes I wonder if this is something I'm still gonna be doing in 20 years from now and I don't really know if it is. I don't think it is, but for right now it's something that's really fun and I'm meeting a lot of great people doing it.
- I don't think I wanna be doing it forever because I don't wanna be breathing this for a very long time. Eventually, I probably will not do fire, but I will always spin if I can, as long as you don't get arthritis.
- I do think that it's gonna fade with time a little bit. I think that we will always continue to incorporate it in our productions in some way.
- I think this is definitely one of those things where even if you get out of the habit for a couple years that it'll always kind of come back. You'll pull the chains out of the closet and be like, "You know, I haven't done this in a while. "I wonder if I've still got it."
- I would love to see everybody learning how to do it. I think it helped me in so many ways become who I am, but I also wanna make sure that people know that it's so dangerous and that they should really have guidance from people who know what they're doing.
- The truth behind fire performers is they mostly do it for themselves because they love it and it is just an extension of ourselves to be able to share that with others.
- I think most importantly, you wanna have a good time and you wanna dance your joy. That's pretty much it.
