Superhooping

My heart's on fire -- That's his latest flame -- Keep the home fires burning -- I don't want to get burned again -- They felt sparks -- She's consumed by love. 

If you’re as much a language-lover as I am, you know these phrases are hardly a coincidence. If you love to watch or spin fire, then you know the link is more than linguistic – it’s primal.  Fire IS love. In the sense that it burns away the excess, eliminates the superfluous, and renders everything to its natural state.

When we dance with fire, we call it “spinning.”  You can’t help but recall spinning in circles when you were a child –- and that kind of free, unattached joy that colored earlier years.  It is as though something about dancing with fire invokes circles. So, for me, as a hooper, learning to fire hoop appeared as the natural evolution of my emerging craft.  The movements my hips had begun to make, the groove my body had begun to take, seemed to beg for it, “Set this on fire.”

I suppose I think everyone should spin fire – just once. There is nothing like the sound.  You think it will be the heat or the sheer fearful force of the element that will strike hardest, move you most.  But it’s the sound.  

HOOPING WITH FIRE, I think sometimes, is the inversion of hooping.  When you dance with fire, it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s what the fire does.  It’s not how you move, but how the fire moves. Your fire toy is the one wearing the ball gown and you’re in the tux.  Your only job is to make her look good.  And she looks good anyway.  So you move in the darkness, free to experiment with this familiar, yet exacting mistress … this element that will for three minutes at least, be dancing with ... and for ... you.