Share
Fire Dancing

firedance
Image from Bernd Helfert

They danced for the tourists, to gain the money that the visitors had and help the local economy. They danced because their parents had danced for thousands of years, mixing frost and movements of flaming flesh into shapes and connected graphs beyond belief. They danced to teach their offspring how to dance, so that the art would grow like a mighty tree of infinite branches and infinite fruits that cared not for gravity or height or seasons. But most of all they danced--to dance. -- From Thin-Mouth Ultraviolet's Dancing Across the Nexus

Fire dancing is a mode of artistic expression that originated in Morini, Darro Local Sector, Non-Coercive Zone, and didn't get much further. The body of the dancer is coated with a volatile oil mixture with a low flashpoint and the oil is lit on fire. The dancer then dances as normal, and the combination of bodily undulations (especially with the more energetic dancing styles) and the trailing varicolored flames produces a truly beautiful effect. In some forms of the art the flames are not extinguished till the dance is over--which means that dancer must move quickly before the coating is burned through. But not too quickly, or the moving air will fan the flames too hot and they will burn through before the dance is done.

The fire dancing of Morini is not to be confused with the vec fire dancing from Aries Vector. Although the basic idea is the same, the fact that the Metasoft dancers can dance arbitrarily long in their fireproof bodies makes the emotional and spiritual meaning entirely different: a purely aesthetic form of art, without the visceral feeling and danger.
 
Related Articles
  • Firesculpting
  • Morini - Text by M. Alan Kazlev
    Darro Local Sector, Non-Coercive Zone - the system from which Fire dancing originated, and to which the art form is still mostly limited.
 
Appears in Topics
Dance
 
Development Notes
Text by Michael Beck, additional material by Anders Sandberg
Bernd Helfert
Initially published on 20 April 2001.

page uploaded 20 April 2001, last modified 14 April 2003
 
 
>