- a San Francisco firedancing troupe -
I’ve been spinning poi since the end of January, 2001. I’m essentially self-taught, with some help from the Home of Poi Web site and the occasional cross-fertilization that happens when two spinners meet and start comparing notes. “Spinners” doesn’t even have to mean fire- or poi-spinners; I picked up a few tricks from a dude I met in a park one day who was in town for an international glowstick competition; he had a couple of glowsticks on strings in his pockets, and showed me how to do a behind-the-head butterfly. In turn, I showed him something; I think it might have been a weave, but don’t quote me on that.
I’ve always been pretty good at spontaneous dance, and I try to infuse that joy-in-movement into my fire dancing. I feel that if you’re enjoying yourself when you dance, and communicating that enjoyment through your movement, then the audience will enjoy it with you, even if your technique isn’t that of a classically trained dancer. I also bring into my dance some of the body awareness that comes from my training in Southern style kung fu and t’ai chi.
I’ve been studying sword since college, first formally (foil fencing) and then informally in a variety of settings. Curiously, it hasn’t helped me all that much in trying to work artistic sword-work into my repertoire; the way you use a sword in combat is very different from the way you use it as an artistic dance prop!
Of all the elements, fire is the most active, the one most concerned with action. Air teaches us knowledge; water, love and compassion; earth, stability and being; but fire teaches us action, will and daring.
Fire is one of the things that separates us from the animals. Other creatures may manipulate the air, or water, or sticks and rocks, but we alone know the ways of the Red Flower. (Yes, it’s a Jungle Book reference. Hey, if I can’t have fun, why do this at all?) We even put fire, in its more modern form of electricity, into our creations, so that they can take actions on their own.
And we are fires, ourselves. We burn fuel (which we call “food”) by mixing it with oxygen to make energy. (Okay, it happens deep inside our cells, but it damn well does happen — it’s why we need to breathe.) We emit burned-up stuff, like the gases that come from a fire (our exhaled breath), and ash (the unburned remnants of our fuel, which we flush down the toilet when we’re done). We even create heat as part of our burning. We are flame.
And fire, along with the heat and light it produces, is symbolic of both creation and of cosmic understanding — often called “enlightenment”. It’s been said that some religions are religions of heat (the more passionate, visceral religions such as Paganism...) and some are religions of light (Buddhism, the monastic orders of Christianity...). But fire itself is a thing both of heat and of light; it brings knowledge (as Prometheus did, even though that part often gets left out) even as it ignites passion.
To me, performance is much more than simply getting up on a stage, or out in the middle of a gathering of people, and doing something that says, “Hey, everybody, look at me!”. That’s just being a ham, or an attention-hog.
When you perform — I’ve always believed that art should try to communicate something. But the performing arts are ones that take place right in front of an audience. The people you’re communicating to are right there in front of you. And so you can feel their emotions, you can feel their reactions to the things you’re doing, or saying, or singing. You put out some energy, you put out something of yourself — you don’t just make a few motions, or say a few words, but you put some of yourself into what you’re doing. And the audience takes that energy, it goes into them and causes some kind of a change in them — your message affects them. And then they put out some energy, returning it back to you, changed and personalized, and amplified by the fact that there are many people, all partaking of the same experience.
It’s a heady rush, and that’s where the performer can take all that new energy and just weave it right into the ongoing tapestry of the performance, building an ongoing positive feedback loop, raising the power of the whole experience above and beyond what people experience most of the time.
That’s what performance is really about, to me.
I have a lot of trouble figuring out what my firedancing style currently is, partly because I’ve never seen any good videos of myself doing it. So I can form a general, attempted, idea of what my firedancing looks like on the outside, but I’m not sure how right I am. But I know what I’d like it to be:
I’d like it to be an outpouring of youthful, joyous vigor. I want to swoop, dart, whirl, and dash — as in “dashing; swashbuckling”. I’d like to look like an incarnation of a god of youthful, bright, creative fire; the red and flickering equivalent of the Green Man/Lord of the Dance. I’d like people watching it to get messages sort of like the following:
If I can make people feel that way, then it doesn’t matter if the lighting was off, or the sound cues were missed, or I stumbled and looked like a fool halfway through my dance — if I managed to communicate those messages, then the performance was a success, no matter what.