Fire show acts, explained

What counts as fire performance

Fire performance covers arts and skills that involve handling fire, usually with equipment carrying one or more wicks that hold a flame big enough to read from a distance. It includes skills based on juggling, baton twirling and poi spinning, as well as fire breathing, fire eating and body burning, sometimes grouped as fakir skills. Shows can be choreographed to music, freestyle or built around talk with the audience. Fire skills appear at beach parties, festivals and corporate events, and performers treat safety as the first rule, summed up in the saying learn before you burn.

Torches: the oldest trick

A fire torch is a club or baton with a wick at one end, swung like Indian clubs or tossed end over end like a juggling club. One of the earliest written accounts of fire performance comes from the water-drawing celebrations at the Second Temple in Jerusalem, around the first century, where a rabbi is said to have tossed eight burning torches upwards with one hand, catching each without any touching. Spinning torches are still a staple, and they head the list of acts the Krating Lai restaurant describes for its own show.

Poi: from the Māori to the beach

The poi is a Māori invention from New Zealand: a ball on a cord, traditionally swung in rhythmic patterns by women, often with singing. The word can mean the object, the choreography or the music. Fire poi swap the ball for a wick of flame-resistant material such as Kevlar, soaked in fuel and lit. Lighting poi is believed to have started in Hawaii in the 1950s as a tourist attraction. Today poi is spun worldwide, mostly by people who teach themselves or learn from each other.

The staff and the dragon staff

A fire staff is a pole of wood or metal with wicks at one or both ends and its balance point in the middle; lengths run from half a metre to two metres or more. Performers either spin it with their hands or roll it over arms, legs and body, a style called contact staff. The dragon staff carries a cross of three or more wicks at each end, which adds momentum and lets it roll in intricate patterns. A burnoff is the moment a spinning staff throws excess fuel off its wicks as two balls of fire.

Fire breathing

Fire breathing makes a plume of flame by spraying a fine mist of fuel from the mouth over an open flame. It is dangerous however carefully it is done. Most professionals learn it as apprentices to an experienced performer, keep a trained safety assistant with a fire blanket and extinguisher nearby, and choose fuels with a high flash point such as paraffin. Almost every serious recorded injury involves untrained people, which is why it belongs to professionals and not to a holiday experiment.

Fire eating

Fire eating means putting a flaming object into the mouth and putting it out. It works by cutting off the oxygen and by the brief cooling of moisture on the surface, not because the flame is cold. Fire eating was part of Hindu, sadhu and fakir performances as a sign of spiritual attainment, and it became a standard sideshow act in the late 1880s, often one of the first skills a sideshow performer learned. Even skilled fire eaters accept small burns and exposure to fuel as part of the job.

The Samoan fire knife

Samoa gave the fire show its knife. The original was a machete with towels bound round each end and a stretch of blade showing between them; lit, it became the centre of a ceremonial dance, siva afi. That dance traces back to ailao, in which Samoan warriors showed off by whirling, throwing and catching a war club. Fire knives have been in use since the 1940s and are the traditional Polynesian fire implement; many traditional fire shows take their cue from the yearly World Fireknife Competition and Samoa Festival. Not every beach troupe uses one.

The fire pump and the running order

The restaurant on Krating Lai Beach bills its fire-pump act as the tallest in Thailand. That is its own description rather than a measured record, so watch it for the spectacle, not the statistic. The show also mixes spinning torches with acrobatics. As with any troupe, the running order is the performers' to set, and the whole fire show lasts about 20 to 30 minutes depending on the wind.

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