Forums > Videos > Fire + Theater

Posted: 14th Nov 2009
That was frikken excellent.

You captured the mood of the song really in both your spinning style and your "costume". I can't say I've ever seen anything quite like that before.

Great touch with the photograph, but I'll toss in my usual complaint here about there not being enough ambient light because after you burned the photograph, I had to go back to the beginning to see what it was you were doing during the song's intro section.

That's the first video I've watched in months and I'm sure glad my first one was that one.

5 stars

Posted: 17th Nov 2009
Hi,
Thanks for the kind words. Forward it along to your mates in Victoria!

Michael

"The storm it came up strong,
and shook the trees,
and blew away our fear."

-R.E.M. "Half a World Away"

Posted: 28th Nov 2009
hiya. very well made vid and great spinning, but i dont get it!
ive had folks talk to me plenty about putting feeling into spinning, but again dont get it.
what do emotions have to do with poi?
ive always considered it the opposite - as a meditative activity where the mind takes a break from all that
- but tis good to see different angles on what poi is to people.
cant stand the song tho!

No air drumming - Bruford could change the timing up so fast you could snap your wrist!

Posted: 29th Nov 2009
Hi 81LL

I can understand why you don't get it as this video is pretty much the polar opposite of the clips you've posted. I'm not trying to be harsh here but this is theater,a performance that's not all about "the moves" but something that communicates a feeling/mood and tries to tell a story by combining several different elements with "the spinning" being only one of them.

I don't want to get into a tech vs dance thing here but maybe we could explore an idea like meditation vs performance with the idea being why people get involved in these arts as a baseline for adopting different styles.

81LL, you're a musician right? Maybe thinking of poi and how it can/does parallel music might shed some light on this idea and help you with your understanding.

Posted: 29th Nov 2009
I enjoy kicking off Socratic dialogues as much as anyone else, so I'll respond with more questions:

What makes some things "have to do with emotion" and not others? Which things have this special emotive property and why? Many people spin fire as a performance art before an audience; what are such performers aiming for if not eliciting an emotional reaction from the audience with their spinning? Since meditation is usually only considered to really impact the person meditating, what is it that makes people respond more to one spinner's style over another? Is the audience's only response a meditative one, in spite of the YouTube comments complimenting the video's emotive impact?

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Posted: 29th Nov 2009
Hi Sister Eleven

Start a thread then.
EDITED_BY: Stout (1259586029)
EDIT_REASON: relevance

Posted: 29th Nov 2009
Oh, I was mainly responding to the "I don't get it" poster, since I don't think an out and out "poi is not emotive" stance is remotely tenable. I wasn't attempting to present any particular line of thinking, so much as challenge the poster to defend their apparent claim that emotive performance and poi are completely disjoint.

Clearly there are reasons to spin other than emotive impact--for instance, in teaching the real point is to get the other person to learn something, whether they feel anything or not. But to imply the claim that the two are simply unrelated (as the poster to whom I am responding did) is, I think, erroneous. The fact that people can have emotional responses to poi, and that one can deliberately alter the use of poi and similar arts to foster such responses, is enough to make clear the relationship between the two (unless the above poster was looking for some kind of metaphysical answer).

(Oh, I suppose they could have also been making a normative claim that poi shouldn't be used for emotive purposes, but again, I think this is a position that would need substantial backing.)

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