Flames swirl in the darkness. Gothic and tribal, pagan and punk, all at the same time.
Empire Fire Festival, a free event featuring shows, installations and food, returns to Adelaide for the fourth year running this weekend.
Fire art has spread from Maori dance and Samoan knife spinning to post-war tourism and raves in Hawaii.
This spread to dance party culture in the 1990s, where fire spinners became a common sight, and fire displays at full moon parties in Thailand.
However, the arts of using fire for play and performance, particularly poi (a flaming ball on a string used in dance), are primarily of Pacific origin.
Jax Watt is currently completing his doctoral dissertation. Whakapapa She studies modern poi fire dancing at Massey University in New Zealand and says the history of fire dancing, and of poi in particular, is difficult to trace because it is fragmented and globalized.
But Samoan knife spinning and fire-throwing poi were brought to Hawaii from across the Pacific to entertain tourists, she said. “They essentially created tourism in Hawaii to give American tourists a Pacific experience.”
Throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s, Freddie Letuli was inspired by Hindu fire-eating entertainers and American baton twirling, added fire to Samoan knife spinning and brought it all back to American Samoa, where he eventually became a senator.
Then, in the early '90s, circus performers who launched the electronic dance movement began fire dancing at festivals.
But before that, poi has a long history in the Māori belief system, with its own unique Whakapapa It goes back to the Maori gods.
Watt will discuss the complex transmission of fire arts from Taiwan and the Philippines, the history of juggling games in pre-colonial times, and fire myths and fire dancing traditions.
She says there are several ancient stories that link fire with playfulness. “For example, Maui was known in several Polynesian cultures for playing pranks, and he tricked the goddess Mahuika into giving him fire.”
Oral tradition also associates fire and heat with dance, including the story of Tāne-Rore, the son of the sun god Ra, who is said to be personified as a heat ray and dance, represented in Māori dance by slight hand tremors.
After newsletter promotion
In a bright, airy studio tucked away in an alleyway off Adelaide's seedy Hindley Street, staff from Dragon Mill School of Fire Arts are rehearsing a range of silent, fire-free movements using a series of fire-based props.
Dragon Mill founder and director Tim Goddard is a fire-twirling master, and he sees fire-twirling as both a performance and a meditative experience.
“It's an interesting exchange between performer and audience,” he says. “There's a bit of an environment, a meditative space. It's loud and bright, so you can't think about anything else.”
Each common prop (staff, hoop, fan, poi) has a different background.
“The common thread is that you can light it and spin it,” he says. “If you have a wick, you can apply it to other movement art forms that use props.”
When asked if there is a spiritual component, Goddard prefers to talk about community interaction and reaching a flow state alongside cultural history.
On stage, the team wears dramatic makeup and costumes to match their tattoos and dreadlocks.
Watt says that although today's fire art is relatively new, it doesn't conflict with Indigenous belief systems.
“Polynesia has a deep and complicated history, and while it's not the same as fire art, it's connected by crossover inspiration,” she said, adding, “There's this kind of fusion, this collective consciousness situation that's starting to happen.”
