AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!

Ok so maybe i'm not as scared as that but i'm still pretty damn scared.

First proper public performance in a week.
Doing it for charity. People are going to sponsor me to play with fire. Wahey!! I've been doing poi for the last 1 and 1/2 months now and i've got quite a lot of good moves under my belt.
(I got everything on the free lessons list, plus a load of wraps and transitions. I can just about do some flowers and am getting about three beats with hyperloops. I can also go from reverse weave then chuck one poi ine the air jump a 180 and catch and cary on forwards. plus a load of other stuff. But that's beside the point.)
The point is do I just go for broke or be conservitive? Oppinions please.
Muchos!

laZy

There is a bit in the book "Poi Spinning" about performing. It say thing like you should always smile and enjoy it and it is important to move around the space that you have.

Also fain struggling to do something and then pull it off. This makes it look more impressive. Another suggestion I have is to start with easy stuff then chuck in the harder looking stuff as you go along to keep your audience interested.

The only other advice I have out is to watch out for wobberly knees. Mine always start to shake when I perform, usually having a stiff drink helps.

yeah, stiff drink.......cheers.
laZy

If you are nervous about performing, try treating it as if you are just having a practice spin and pretend that the audience aren't there!

It seems to work for me.

Most of all though:

Enjoy yourself!!

and good luck

hey good luck man

I probably performed for the first time after about a month or so.
I've been spinning fire and performing regularely for about 3 years now, and I can say that most of what I learned performance-wise was in the first couple times I did it in front of an audience. You'll probably see this too! Hopefully your audience will be as good at giving feedback as mine have been

good luck on your first show! remember, you're spinning big balls of fire, even if you have to keep it slow and do simple moves your first time because you're so nervous...the audence will think it's amazing! i mean, really...how could they not? sometimes i think that as firedancers we have been desensitized to the amazingness of what we do...just because we are around it so often. but for people who haven't seen it before, no matter what you do, they'll think you're wonderful!

whew

ok, i'm done now really
-sarah-

Thanks all. Never thought of the desensitizing thing. Crazy Little bit of before hand and a lot of after wards.
laZy

Yeah, it's difficult to know what moves will impress an audience. My style these days involves a lot of isolation, the odd hyperloop, and lots of stalling and a bit of wrapping (with the occasional through-wrap). Those look mostly good to other spinners (when I get it right), but for some people they fail to see the attraction.

One piece of advice I have is to use the right toys for the style that you do. Ropes help for a lot of the moves I mentioned above, because then you see both ends, and for air-wraps and hyperloops, you see the ropes cross (because of them being on fire). I probably use ropes much more than any of my other poi these days. For those who do a lot of wrapping, ropes are bad (obvious, no?).

I mean months, am I really learning that fast...
cool...

I've performed before. I've done shows for friends and so on. I do it sometimes at my schools social club. The reason i'm nervous is because the most Iv'e performed before is around twenty people but this charity thing will mean that there will be more, lot's more.

Foam, not Co2 going to remember that.

I'll have a couple of people standing neraby just incase I set myself alight.

When you say that using ropes aren't good for wraps, why? Mine are chains but I can't see why changing them to rope would make any difference.

Are they on fire?!!!! ( Visions of some seriously cool spinning with my chains on fire as well )

If you have ropes that are on fire don't you get discs instead of circles?

Lot's of questions.

laZy

Yes they are on fire, yes they make discs & yes they are awesome to spin:

4 rope photo click here

depending on the design ropes have a shorter burn time, & they're ok for wraps, quick bounce wraps & when they're not fully loaded with fuel - otherwise hurty-painy-burny-ouch!

Good Luck with ya gig

Oh migod!!!
That is SO cool.
Thanks
laZy

to explain:
CO2 will freeze the person your extinguishing, because the temperature will get way below zero.
powder you will cause a lot of pain, because it is a salt powder, and salt in open wounds, eyes or burns works just as well as on snails...

eric pOpsteric.

PS thanks for taking my advise seriously...

My ropes don't have that short a burn time.... erm (around 5min, I think). But yeah, that's why you don't want to do wraps with them. To be fair, once the rope bit goes out, and you're just left with the knot at the end going, wrapping them does become possible, and throughwraps are possible as long as you do them round jeans and suchlike.

Hey good luck on your public show.

Enjoy the adrenaline before the show and be very proud afterwards.

If its a crowd who have never seen fire simple will impress heaps. Move around and enjoy yourself. Think back to the first times you seen fire and how impressed you were.

The more you look like you are having fun the more the audience will enjoy it with you. (Thats assuming you can walk and chew gum and smile . I still have trouble performing anything with a smile and can't mulitask that well yet)

Yay
Goodluck


Practice in whatever you plan to wear before the show, have a good look at the show area and have good spotters to watch the punters and you.

Anything that wraps around the body is amazing. My mum wont even watch any simple wraps so they abviously look impressive without being too hard.

Oh, another thing, make sure you know what the ground conditions are like. Some of the bits of grass recently have been horrendously muddy, and as a result quite slippy. If it is slippy remember that you're going to need to be more careful.

Salt blast, nice.

What kind of rope would you use to set alight?

Could you weave a cord through the links of my chains, then soak it in parafin?

laZy

Wow, i want ropes
goodluck with the show. as others have said, people will generally just be impressed with the fact that you're twirling fire. If you try chucking in your crazy technical 'this took me soooo long to get' moves in, most spectators probably are not even going to appreciate it any more. But don't let that stop you, just don't think you have to do the tricky stuff to impress people. Any way goodluck, have fun, and have more fun

That picture is crazy. Recon I could just use some strips of towel instead of the kevlar, just for a one off. Wrap it through my chains like I said.
This is going to be so much fun!

laZy