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.

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.

First and probably most obvious is the ability to demonstrate the move/pattern/sequence you’re teaching. Though, I am also quite sure there are some things I can teach which I can not actually demonstrate (only because I have actually done this), being able to do the movement (to some degree) certainly helps.

The ability to demonstrate the movement ought not be confused with the ability to speak a step-by-step description — including hand, tool and body movements/positions — to the students. I won’t repeat everything I wrote in this blog entry distinguishing the different skills of technicians and teachers, but I will reiterate the premise: just because you can do a move doesn’t mean you can teach it step-by-step to someone else who can’t pick it up from a demonstration. This, for me, is often the crux of teacher credibility. I remember the first time I saw Zan break something down at FireDrums several years back  I was really impressed because he did so much more than demonstrate it (which is what I had seen most of the time I was at the gathering) and actually explained the steps. In that moment, he was more than just another amazing performer and I hope more artists develop this skill so we can raise the overall quality of instruction in the industry.

Equally important to being able to speak directions is the ability to write the instructions down in a reproducible way so people can refer back to it — potentially with diagrams, tables and charts to aid in learning and expand on the basic movement to the theories it represents.

And then there is feedback. Being able to give the students feedback on what they are doing — both in terms of what they are doing the same as and differently from what you are teaching — is critical to instructor credibility. A video is a cool learning tool, and, when you’re in a classroom, if you don’t get direct feedback on what to change in order to better accomplish the desired goal one of the biggest motivations to take in person instruction disappears.

Now a lot of this points to learning a specific movement. If you’re instructor is teaching in a more theoretical way, I say the same thing applies in that a credible instructor will be able to distinguish their theory, then demonstrate a specific (probably several) example of the use of the theory with the ability to then break down that particular example(s) in detail. To be sure, I believe the best education will touch on both the specific and the theoretical so one can work in both the applied and abstract dimensions to improve their skills.

I share this as part of an ongoing series of articles to assist instructors in developing more skill and credibility as well as aiding students in developing criteria designed to pursue the highest quality, best value instruction available for them.

In flow,
GlitterGirl

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

I’m so excited to read your post. As a woman who was a 300 pound couch potato at 22 and now is an internationally renowned fire dancing instructor — hula hoop, poi, staff, fans included — at 40, I’m a walking example and advertisement for “Love your body right now, as it is!” I’m still what most men would objectify as a “fat girl” thought they would say, “a fat girl who can move” once they saw me dance.

And you know what? Who cares? For me, it’s all about the practice of being in my body and getting more comfortable with me every day. The cornerstone of our work at my school, Temple of Poi, is about helping people with their mindset, cause let’s face it — when 40 looms around the corner it is ever so easy to suddenly start thinking about getting old. Biology just starts kicking in and there are things that really begin to make you feel older. So when you stand next to someone else who just somehow doesn’t seem so old or out of shape (or actually isn’t!), it’s really easy to make a big deal out of that because when we’re younger, no one bothered to teach us these three simple rules: Leave your judgment behind; choose your language consciously from a place of empowerment; and compare your self to your self.

The fundamental question I encourage everyone to ask is this: “did you make progress and have fun?” If so, it (class, practice, life) was a success. I have consistently found over the nearly 8 years I’ve had my school - where I do teach people how to safely play with fire in all contexts - that integrating this mindset is pivotal in Celebrating Life In the Moment.

Sure, some part of our ego might want to have that 6 pack after we just gave birth without doing ab work. And, well, that simply may not be what is meant for our experience. Why should I compare myself to that other person whose journey was absolutely nothing like mine? How does that serve? So if you’re looking at helping your own psyche, I offer you this mindset (written in more detail at on the Temple of Poi website) to help you embrace the You that You are right now even as she grows, evolves, changes and becomes more than she was moments ago.

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.

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