Fire Spinning

One of our friends, Tim Roberts, is a fire spinner.  He has always been fascinated by fire, and he has really taken to this sport.  He and some friends perform in central Illinois.  Recently Tim did a show for us, and my partner Doug Edwards took photos.  

Great Balls of Fire!

Let me begin by saying that my dear friend Tim is a highly trained stunt lunatic.  Don’t try any of these crazy things. You’ll set yourself on fire, and not in a good way.  (So has Tim, though not this time.  We did have two people with safety equipment standing by, just in case.)  You’ve been warned.  Now come watch the show…

The first set featured one of Tim’s new tools, a fire sword.  This is a steel sword with wicking wrapped around the blade.  In the sword dance, the flaming blade creates broad swaths of light.

Notice that in many of these photos, Tim himself is blurry: that’s an effect of the long exposure used to capture the flaming trails of the fire dancing.

The Flaming Sword

A Sword Pattern

The next set featured poi balls.  This pair consists of small knots of wicking on short chains.  They are twirled together to create beautiful patterns.

Poi Balls: Ring Pattern

The third set featured fire breathing.  I have seen other demonstrations of this feat, but so far, nobody does it quite like Tim.  He is the only person I’ve seen really create a “dragon breath” effect coming out of a human body — he blew it straight at us once, and wow did we jump back!  (There was a fire pit between him and us, but that was still a formidable display.  The writer in me is gleeful for the hero’s-eye view.)  The best picture of the evening came out of this set.  Tim is pretty crisp in this one because he was posed rather than dancing.

Breathing Fire

The last set involved a second set of poi balls with larger heads.  They displayed some different patterns … and a little something else that I wasn’t expecting to get caught by the camera.

Figure 8 Pattern

This picture captures the spiral effect of the poi balls as they move.

Spiral Pattern

This pattern sweeps the poi around and between the spinner’s legs.

Hot Down There!

Here Tim was spinning both poi in a short circle very close to his face.

Short Circles

For those of you who are of mystical bent … Tim doesn’t just like fire, fire likes Tim right back.  Throughout this show, I was watching some small fire elementals playing with him and riding the flames.  I was not expecting the salamanders to show up in the pictures, but they did.  These are two of the clearest images of these playful fire spirits.

The first salamander appears in the left loop of this picture, at the top looking down.  He has a long snout, a dark orange eye, and a mane showing behind his head.

Salamander with Mane

Another salamander appears in this image.  Again it is diving down, this time near the center of the loops, at the end of that bright hook.  It has a shorter snout with a similar orange eye, and its mouth is open.

Salamander Diving

Sometimes, salamanders are as cute as dogs sticking their heads out of a car window.

So there you have it, a spectacular fire show featuring a fire sword, fire breathing, and two sets of poi balls.  We were all impressed and honored by the performance, for which our thanks.  I am further delighted that some splendid pictures emerged from this batch.