Poi Fire Dancing Spinning Performance & Twirling (Hoop Staff Fans Also)

What: Temple of Poi 2010 Fire Dancing Expo
Where: Union Square (Geary and Post)
When: April 24, 2009 at 7:50-10:10 pm
Cost: Free!!

Bring a chair and a blanket and join us April 24, 2009 at 7:50 pm for our fifth annual free fire dancing show in San Francisco’s legendary Union Square (Geary and Post) for the fourth annual Temple of Poi Fire Dancing Expo.

This year’s show is a veritable who’s who of internationally renowned fire dancing performers hailing from 3 continents including:

• MCP (Edinburgh, Scotland) - dragon staff solo
• Redox (Temple of Poi) - poi solo
• Aileen Lawlor (Oakland, CA) - wand and contact staff
• Memory Elena & Corey White (Bay Area) - fans
• Alien Jon (Currently residing somewhere on planet Earth) - poi solo
• Dyami & Wryly (Santa Cruz, Ca) - single poi duet
• Bradley Allbee (West Los Angeles, CA) - poi solo
• Sarah Starlight (Temple of Poi) - hoop solo
• Ian Boyd, Anthony ‘Broadway’ Rutland, Ayala Kalisher, Russ Megowan, Dyami Kaplan
  & Sara Huntley are Kinetica! (Santa Cruz, CA) - fans, staff, double staff
• Corey Just (Oakland, CA) - fan solo
• Erin Shredder of Shredder Hoops (San Francisco, CA) - hoop solo
• Celsius Maximus (Monterey, CA) - fans, swords
• Vin DeLuca & Solenne Alexa (San Francisco, CA) - staff poi duet
• Vatra (San Francisco) - poi solo
• Russ Megowan & Jake Yoshioka are Hybridz R Us (Santa Cruz, CA) - poi duet
• Zan & Aurora Moore of Instruments of the Now (Portland, OR) - poi duet
• GlitterGirl & Kahunahula (San Francisco, CA) - poi hoop duet
• Colleen Sullivan, Krista Borst, Emily Port, Don Keenan & Michael Henninger of Firish (Bay Area, CA) - hoop, fan, staff, poi
• Erik Aylen, Shaina Dyani Johnson, Bridget Harrison, Alysia Hook & Oliver Pavick are Copper Lantern Fire Theater (Oakland, CA) - wand, fan, poi, hoop and staff
• Matt McCorkle & Brian Thompson are Circus Conspiracy (Oakland, CA) - clubs
• Miss Rosie (San Francisco, CA) - hoop solo
• Rob Horner of PYRODYNAMICS Fire Dance Productions (Cairns, Australia) - 7 staves solo
• Adam Herscheid of Flames Of the Phoenix (Cairns, Australia) - double staff solo
• Adam Herscheid & Rob Horner are Flames of the Phoenix & Pyrodynamics (Cairns, Australia) - double staff duet
• Luis Chavez, Gatamala, Juicy Jess and Luna Del Fuego of Fire Euphoria (Santa Cruz, CA)
• The Amazing Baz & Drex are Ouroboros (Boston & Washington DC) - poi duet
• Mike Icon & Jenni van Tassel of Cirque d’Optique (Philadelphia, PA) - poi hoop fan duet
• Ansel Cummings & Kyle Ford of Pyrotechniq (Iowa City, IA) - umbrella, torches, poi
• Yuta (Tokyo, Japan) - poi solo
• Chryseph of Obsidian Moon (Seattle, WA) - rope dart, staff solo
• Madelaine “Wolf” Bukiet & Lauren “Madamn Burnz” Picheney of Las Piratas Del Fuego (Brooklyn, New York) - contact
• D. “Mac” Kaul, Dave “O.D.”  Kaul, Dave King (founder of Controlled Burn), Carlyn “Wrangler” Perona, Angel “Fire Angel” Schultz, Barbara “Dr. Soos” Slaughter, Brenda Ashworth, Evonne “Shelly” George, Katrina “Glitter Bee” Whitten, Kelin Whitten, Kurt “Titwi” George,  Mark “Lucky” Ashworth, Roger “Rogeman” Stimson, Sage “Safire” Ashworth, Shane “Saul Goode” Peterson, Tom “Moon Penguin” Fougner & Bill “Dammit Bill” Schultz from Controlled Burn (Reno, NV) - poi, fan, staff
• Banyan (Chicago, IL) - s staves
• Jaden Rose of Solar Flare (San Francisco, CA) - double hoop

The 2010 Expo also marks the 5th Anniversary of Temple of Poi Fire Dancing Expo and this show is once again on the City of San Francisco and Union Square’s Jewels in the Square Program. Jewels in the Square is an ongoing series of culturally significant presentations made in San Francisco’s Union Square in an effort to make diverse entertainment available to the public for free.

The creation of this event – selected in 2010 for the 4th consecutive year as one of Bay Area Dance week’s Cornerstone events – is a tremendous leap in the efforts to legitimize fire dancing as an art form by taking it out of parking lots and putting it on landmark stages like Union Square. The Expo celebrates safe, legally permitted, public fire dancing performance in honor of National Dance Week, an annual 10-day week of free public dance events in the Bay Area designed to showcase the dynamic diversity and critically acclaimed quality of Bay Area dance.

Temple of Poi supports this vision by creating an unprecedented opportunity to celebrate fire dancing at no cost to the artists or audience. This event is a not for profit event created with the intention of:

• offering more performance opportunities for fire dancers
• giving novice artists who might otherwise not have an opportunity to perform in a public setting an opportunity where they can invite friends and family to see them express their art
• increased exposure to the flow fire art forms by creating a legally permitted public event at a San Francisco landmark location
• raise the awareness of fire dancing as a prestigious dance form by holding this event on the opening night of National Dance Week

This $5000 event is being financed by Isa “GlitterGirl” Isaacs, Temple of Poi, Union Square Park and San Francisco, generous donations from Susan Drews Watkins and you! 

Due to the economic challenges of the current economy, we are requesting fiscal support in funding this event. If you’re moved by our cause to legitimize flow and fire arts, use the Chip-In link on this page to help defray the costs of the event which include fire permits (almost $800 for the fire permit) travel stipends for out of state artists ($1000), programs, marketing and more.

For all you performers looking to improve your skill as a performer — not your technique with the tool itself — here’s a great little perspective on why learning more skills may not be the place you need to focus.

When we perform, we’re in what we like to describe as an “energy bubble” here at Temple of Poi. If you expand the bubble by reaching out the audience, then you’re creating an energetic exchange in which you have a “dialogue” between you.

If, however, you stay on stage cloistered in your own bubble, then you become sort of this objectified thing that audience members are disconnected from.

Neither is right or wrong and they both work.

However, if you want to take the audience on a journey, it can often be easier to do that when you actually create the “dialogue” described above because when you shoot energy at the audience, they have an opportunity to do something with it: absorb it, deflect it, and/or reflect it.

If you think about the tentacle of energy you shot to them like a (friendly and desirable) virus, when they absorb it, that automatically changes your crowds energy and the people around them are likely to be infected with it to some degree also. If they reflect it, then not only are they impacted and infecting others around them, they are transmuting the virus of yummy performance energy back to you such that you’re performance is also changed. Even if they deflect it, they may be deflecting it to someone else who possibly absorbs it.

The more one shoots those tentacles to the audience, the more possibility of this transmutation is possible.

Ergo, if one is shy on stage and inward - which is often coupled with technical spinning - the audience is often left in awe but with little actual opportunity to do anything other than marvel.

We contend that a tech spinner who can also actively direct the tentacles of energy to the audience — weather they dance or not — will have a much more impactful experience on the crowd who will then infect them with more power which will have the performer have more powerful tentacles of energy passed to the audience, which causes more impact on the audience and so on in an upward spiral of positive energy that creates more and more powerful  performances overall.

So if you have the skills but don’t feel like you are getting the sort of response from the crowd you’d like, it might be fun to try to “reach out, reach out and touch someone…” with your energy and see how that changes things for you and them.

Please apply only if this vision calls to you.

Temple of Poi is hosting the 5th annual Temple of Poi Fire Dancing Expo in San Francisco, California, USA’s Union Square on the main stage. This event is free to the public and is open to audiences of all ages. Events over the past years have had an estimated 1000+ people in attendance. This year’s show is April 24 at 7:50 pm. Call time for dancers is 6:30 pm.

The purpose of this show is multifold:

• to expand awareness of the art form
• so that fire dancing artists can be taken seriously in the world through performance on credible stages in gorgeous venues rather than be looked at as fringe or parking lot art
• to share our art with the community and world
• to celebrate National Dance Week (April 23 - May 2)
• to offer artists from around the world an opportunity to perform for a very grateful and more attuned than average audience
• to allow artists the opportunity to be on a top notch stage which is huge (70ft wide by 30 feet deep), elevated and inspiring
• community service
• as a spiritual practice of giving from a place of non attachment to results

While we had intended, in part, for this to be a marketing event when the first show was produced — as a renegade in 2004 — the reality is, it hasn’t work out that way. Despite any rumors to the contrary, Temple of Poi has never made a single penny off this show and has never gotten a single client because of the show alone. Not once. We know this because we ask client’s how they find us and never has this show been credited as the reason.

In order to maintain the integrity of the vision of the show, we do not pay any performers. Period. No exceptions. MCP, Icon, Yuta, Banyan, Dai, Manda Lights, Thomas, Alien Jon, Vatra and all the rest of the artists who have graced our stage have not gotten paid. They have gifted themselves and their art to the show and community.

To be clear, the 2008 show (the biggest one so far) cost about $6000 to put on. These days getting up on the stage costs nearly $2000 alone. In 2008, we gave about $1200 in travel stipends on top of that. That doesn’t include any marketing, sound systems, hiring for assistance in organizing the show, etc. required to create a show of this magnitude. In 2009, we gave $1000 in travel stipends, all of which was raised through the generous donations of friends and members of the Temple of Poi Community. We will again be offering travel stipends in 2010.

We do this as a gift to the community. And every artist who gets up on the stage does it as a gift to the community as well.

All of that said,  we do have a limited number of travel stipends for artists. All travel stipends go to artists outside of California and states bordering California. This year, we hope to have 10 $100 travel stipends and will be awarded at our discretion.

Guidelines for Applicants

• Interested applicants must submit their application via email to GlitterGirl at: 2010expo (at) templeofpoi daht com by noon pacific time, February 5, 2010 in order to be considered.
• All applicants must submit four things:
  • A completed information sheet - only one per group
  • A signed agreement sheet for each person in the group to be included in the fire permit application - please print, sign, scan and email it back
  • a URL with a link to a video submission of the proposed piece or similar piece (or something representative of your work), ideally using fire
  • a signed  video release form for each person performing as part of your group - please print, sign, scan and email it back
• Restrictions/Agreements:
  • Call time: For tool and costume inspection will be 6:30 PM. You must be there with your tools in working order by that time.
  • No tosses! Tosses were not allowed in 2009 and will not be allowed in 2010 — there was a $300 fine per toss implemented last year, so write your act without tosses. This is a restriction imposed by the fire department, not by Temple of Poi.
  • Stage Time: Solo acts are limited to 4 minutes; Group acts are limited to 6 minutes
  • Spin off: Artists agree to spin off their tools before taking the stage.
  • This is a white gas only show! Because the stage is very slick already, we do not allow the use of lamp oil since it does not evaporate and creates a safety danger for performance acts following your group. Artists must have prior experience spinning with white gas only.
  • Prohibited tools/acts: Fire spitting, fire works, propane tanks (or any fuel under pressure), steel wool or anything else that will leave residue on the stage are all prohibited for fire permit reasons.
  • Costumed requirements: For permit and safety reasons, all artists must wear natural fiber.
  • Soloists: Solo acts must have a separate application, even if you are part of a group.
  • Groups: Each group must apply with one application and a designated contact person. All members of the group must be listed on that application. All members of the group must complete sign a video release form.
• In an effort to support a diverse show, priority will be given to artists more than 150 miles from San Francisco. After all, they are coming quite a long way to donate their time, energy and brilliance to a Bay Area fire show!
• We are pleased to announce that there will be a limited number of stipends made available to out-of-town performers. They will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Please note on your application if you would like to be considered for a stipend. All travel stipends go to artists outside of California and states bordering California. In 2010, we hope to have 10 $100 travel stipends which will be awarded 1 per act.
• This is a non-profit event; therefore, performers will not be compensated monetarily in 2010.
• Artists must have prior experience extinguishing burning tools.
• Artists must agree to abide by the Flowology Mindset® as related to the event:
  http://templeofpoi.com/flowology/mindset.php

In the past few months I’ve switched to HDPE tubing on my hoop and dropped from a 41.5″ 160 PSI irrigation tube hoop to a 38″ inch in the HDPE. This has been a sizable endeavor for me and in some ways, it feels like I’m starting all over again. My on body hooping is just starting to feel decent, though my off body hooping has been oh so much easier and doable and a lot less painful for my RSI.

One of the biggest boons for my on body hoop practice that came from the switch is the undeniable ease of reversals with the lighter hoop. Lose what feels like 5 pounds of weight and suddenly, a reversal is possible in all sorts of ways that I could never have done before. So, in a sense, the gear switch has really facilitated a big shift in my hoop practice.

As it turns out, my RSI has been very problematic in my right elbow and wrist which has made it tough for me to do extended poi practices, especially of any movements that require an extension of my arm (like flowers). Sadly, I can only practice 5-7 minutes of this sort of movement before my elbow starts hurting pretty badly, even with anti-inflammatory meds and biofreeze. Even still, over the past few months, when I can practice, I have been incredibly drawn to anti spin flowers and CAP combinations. So it has become, due to the pain, imperative that I make each spin count.

It’s been fun to see how each of these practices have been informing each other. I used to think of stalls with poi as a reversal, which, in a sense, is accurate. After considering it for longer, it isn’t really a reversal in the same sense that a CAP is. With a CAP, there is not such an explicit moment of stopping the momentum but rather a change of direction of the momentum. When I started focusing on reversing the CAP in different places (12, 3, 6 and 8), that really helped me open into a different way of thinking about reversals in poi.

Last night was a super fun practice where I was just working on some hybrid reversals in a particular sequence I hadn’t tried before. It looked something like this:

and I was also working on the underhand equivalent:

I’m surprised I never tried it before because I’ve been trying to integrate this sequence for a while:

which is essentially just a 4 petal flower alternating with a hybrid combination where I switch the hand doing the long arm in the hybrids. Even though I’ve been practicing this sequence for a while, the hybrid reversal combination from last night was actually easier for me to do in less time with more integration I think in part because I was internalizing the hand switch as a reversal. I didn’t get to apply the theory to the other combination before my elbow told me I was done practicing, but that’s up soon.

As we near the end of the footage from the 2007 Expo (most of the rest was either off stage or the sound didn’t), here’s a fun little student piece featuring the oldest and youngest performers of the evening. This 5 person piece features Gen as the oldest performer (58 at the time) and Danica as the youngest performer (13 at the time) of the evening with three other hot ladies in the middle. This is a student performance which was the premier fire performance for most of the students. Enjoy this set as Delicious takes the stage.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (27.2MB)

I first started dancing at Sunset Parties the day before my 29th birthday (if you’re not up for the math, that’s 1998). One of the things I really loved about it was that I was in the midst of a bunch of dancers vibing off their energy and that was feeding my dancing. Of course, I didn’t really start relating to it that way until much later when I reflected back on it and started to realize how much I really like to dance.

As I started to play with poi, my poor skill and the subsequent space requirements at dance parties relegated me to the back corner of the room. Ug. What a bummer. I was not able to play in the crowd and rather than being one of the dancers on the floor hanging out with my friends and vibing off the flow of the crowd, I was one of the side attractions on the way out the door.

For my 40th birthday, I went to LA and visited with Randy and Spencer and we went to Billy’s Society party. I had a great performance, and, later on in the night was even more fun. I can recall the two of them sitting on a couch in a narrow hallway on the way to the rest rooms and I wanted to be spinning and not sitting down. So I just started whipping out my ogg poi in the narrow hallway. On one side was a glass fronted display case and the couch on the other. Between the couch and the display case was perhaps 2.5-3 feet of space.

At that point, I was playing with being able to do moves and interact with people as they were walking to the bathroom. It was a fun little game and it was so interesting to see how different people responded — some fearful, but most playing with me and moving with me as I was doing my tricks because they recognized I was very aware of them and they could see I was skilled with the poi.

I’ve been out dancing a few times since then and done this a little bit, but last night something amazing happened. I was with my Illuminaughty crew — my first Burning Man family — at the Dia De Los Muertos fundraiser. The space was small and the sound system was intimate, so I really wanted to be on the main dance floor. And, I wanted to be dancing with my poi. And there really was no space for me to go for it with long poi. And, I wanted to dance with my friends. Later, at the afterparty , with an even smaller dance floor and disco ball overhead, I was in the same situation.

I started playing this game of, “How Close Can I Get?” And I had some huge breakthroughs! Because of the tiny space, I would go between dancing without the poi and dancing with the poi wrapped up in my hands. What I noticed is that I really started using my body in new and different ways with the poi because I was both watching out for hitting my friends while also trying to really go for it and maintain my high NRG dance style. I was amazed by how small a space I really needed to be able to flow with the crowd and I had an awesome time just being one of the dancers on the dance floor AND also using my poi at the same time. I was right in the midst of dancers — not up against a wall, at an exit, or even off the main floor like I was in the past. The dancing was really much more body oriented than normal and the movements, while fun, were much more in connection with the flow of the dance floor itself than in connection with the tricks of the poi, even though I definitely did some tricky things.

If you’re a dancer and you get all juiced by being on a dance floor, there is nothing like being in the midst of “your people” and playing with your poi. Of course, you have to get competent enough with the poi to do this. . . which is the game.

And, I really have to admit, I wouldn’t do this with the same level of NRG I had last night on just any old dance floor. These people know me and trust me with my poi and are also somewhat forgiving (well, very forgiving — thanks Chris!) if I brush their legs  with the poi. Still, it’s a game worth trying for all your poi dancers out there!

Have fun and I hope you end up as happily sore as I am today!

Wow.

What an utterly cool experience walking into Borders (only the one in Bloomingdale’s mall right now) and finding my postcards there. You can see them in this photo.

I’ve been threatening to write this piece for months and I’m finally taking a moment to sit down and do it. After FireDrums and talking to a lot of my students I got really clear that this article might be useful for some folks who assume that because someone is a skilled technician with their tools, they can also teach.

For years we have made jokes with students about teaching saying that if someone shows you a move and says, “All you do is this…” they are not really teaching you anything. They are showing you something. Now I grant you, for highly visual learners, as well as intuitive learners or systems engineers or just really geeky flow peeps, this technique will garner some success. As a matter of fact, I would guess that most of the self taught individuals out there who have a vast repertoire are really people who are coming from the place of being able to look at something and break it down in their head, even if they don’t consciously know they are doing this. This skill, called modeling, is something we all learn from a young age and we have been doing it all our lives. Some people just really are good at modeling. These people, however, are the ones who are most able to learn on their own.

In contrast, there are a lot of students/artists/practitioners out there who are not adept with this ability. And for those people, someone showing them a move and saying, “All you do is this…” isn’t really going to give them the steps necessary to learn a move. A classic example: the behind the back weave. I mean, all you do is do the same thing you did in front of your body behind your body still working with the same basic cross over and the same basic side planes. Yet, if it were that easy, why doesn’t everyone do it right after you explain it? Or at least understand it?

The answer? Because all of our minds work differently.

As someone who has spent the better part of my time learning how to work with all styles of learners since I started the Temple in 2002, I have made a study of different techniques that work with different types of students. Someone having the ability to stand there and have the skill and technique necessary to do a move does not mean they also have the ability to teach the move to other people because teaching and technique are different things completely.

For one thing, some students prefer to see the move and other students prefer to feel the move while still others prefer to hear the rhythm of the move. And even as we each may have a preference, it is also true that we all use each of our senses to some degree to learn.

Essentially, a technician is someone who can perform the move. A good coach can speak to all your senses and actually break down the move in a way you can comprehend. A great coach can speak to each student in the way they can understand it best and does not require the student to meet the teacher where they are at because a great coach meets the student where the student is at.

An amazing coach can do all of this and even teach things they have not mastered themselves — even Tiger Woods has a coach and he’s ranked number one in the world. His 2003 coach Butch Harmon, isn’t a well known golfer. So if he’s not a good golfer, who is he? “In 2003 Harmon was ranked the top golf teacher in the United States in a poll of his peers organized by Golf Digest magazine, and has repeated as winner of this honour each year since.“

Here’s a set from the Bahamas when we were doing an impromptu performance after our real performance got canceled because of weather. I had hurt my knee — you can even see the bandage under my pants on my left leg — so it, sadly, impacted the quality of the set. I like the set, but more because it was fun to be there with my Pyrotechniq friends than because the set was super amazing although I think this was the first set in which I performed front/back CAPS (where one hand stayed in front doing the cap while the other stayed in back, using side planes). It was also fairly early on in my use of the front plane CAP combinations and the behind the head double stall barrel roll combination. And I also think the premier of the 2 petal split direction flower turn around I do in there toward the end. It felt solid on a lot of levels, but I was hurting and limping while performing which really wasn’t the most fun.

Please note, sometimes you have to wait for the video to load to see the video even though you can hear the soundtrack. Also note you can get this on the Temple of Poi PodCast for GlitterGirl’s Practice and Performance videos.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (20.3MB)

In an effort to be even more environmentally friendly and accommodate all types of tools, here’s the new Temple of Poi spin out technique for permitted events (a version based on what I used with Pyrotechniq when we were in the Bahamas) that required no dry wall and meets SFFD regulations (best as I understand them).

The fuel area:
All dipping buckets and catch buckets are placed on top of trays (aluminum trays with a lip on them) so that any excess fuel does not contaminate the surface underneath. All fuel can be recycled to the buckets by pouring them back in; thus, it is ideal to have two trays under each bucket — one to recycle, one to catch recycled fuel. These are then disposed of after the show.

Spin out:
Each tool is placed in a baggie and then spun out. The baggies are ziplocked closed and, in as much as possible, hold only the wick so the fuel does not splatter on the rest of the tool. Large/unusual size tools (like swords) can use garbage bags if necessary, though, generally, squirt bottle application not requiring spin out is best. After the tool is spun out, the excess fuel then gets recycled to the bucket.

Process for each tool:
Fans and hoops get one ziplock baggie for each wick. Best to use sandwich baggies for these. All of these can be applied at once and the tool can then be spun out.

Poi (rope dart and meteor) heads can both be put into a 1 gallon ziplock and spun out at the same time. Some poi ropes might require a 2 gallon ziplock, depending on the size.

Staves should be handled one head at a time, or, if you’re doing double, 1 head of each double at a time. Attach the ziplock bag to the head (1 quart to 1 gallon, depending on the size of the head(s)), close it as much as possible. Then, grabbing the staff from the other *non fueled* end, whip it around like a baseball bat several times to get the excess fuel to spin into the zip lock baggie. Recycle fuel, dip other end, and repeat.

What you’ll need (all of which can acquired at Safeway or Costco or something like that):
- 1 box sandwich baggies
- 1 box 1 quart baggies
- 1 box 1 gallon baggies
- 1 box 2 gallon baggies
- possibly tall kitchen bags, depending on tools. Highly recommended use squirt bottles not dipping method.
- 2 catch trays per dipping bucket (therefore, 5 buckets needs 10 tray)