Freshman showcases fire spinning

By Kathleen Grohman

The colored lights look like a series of glowing orbs in slow motion as freshman Rachel Witte spins them. It looks like magic, but none is involved.

Witte, who goes by the nickname Binx after a cartoon rabbit, is spinning poi, a performing art of fire spinning that she first discovered while visiting her father in Maui.

"One night he was like, 'There's this drum circle on the beach. You should come see it.' And so we went down there, and there were people spinning fire, and I was like 'Wow, I have to do this.' That was my first time seeing it," Witte said.

Upon returning home to Albuquerque, Witte went to a magic and juggling shop where they lent her some poi to practice with before a workshop later that week.

Now, in response to interest her peers have expressed at parties, Witte has decided to turn her passion into profit by teaching lessons. She plans to charge $5 per half hour and already has one student lined up. "There are a lot of people that are like, 'Oh, you're a raver,' and I'm not actually," she said. "This is legitimate."

Spinning poi is composed of three main pieces: the handles, which vary according to skill level, the chains or rope, and the poi (the ball or beanbag on the end of the string).

As she describes this to me, she pulls different sets of poi out of her desk drawer: small silver chains, a plastic bag of Kevlar wrapped in white cloth, dark-blue, sparkling poi with small streamers and the light-colored poi she would perform with later.

She lays them out on her bright red couch and begins to swing the poi with easy twirls of her wrist, moving the poi around her body instinctively as if the chain and poi were just extensions of her fingers.

It is not hard to imagine her manipulating fire, and when she describes the fire poi to me it sounds pretty simple. "It's a Kevlar weave. You just get these strips of Kevlar and weave them together and dip them in camping fuel and then spin that off," she said. "You just light the fuel on fire, and then you just burn it until you realize you're burning the Kevlar."

Ironically, before Witte started spinning poi, she was afraid of fire. "I had a fear of hot things, just terrified of burning myself. So it's kind of funny that I do fire poi."

Witte said one of the things people usually don't realize is that it's really loud when you're spinning.

"You're just engulfed in this fire sound, and you're just overwhelmed," she said. "You have to kind of forget that you're spinning fire and just think, 'All right, I'm used to the weight of this, and I'm moving with it,' and hope you don't hurt yourself."

Witte has been lucky, though, most of her injuries were slight bumps and bruises while practicing poi with tennis balls in her backyard, trying to get her planes straight. "I've hit myself a lot. I'll wake up and think I have a huge zit and be like, no, that's just a bruise on my forehead. For fire, I've singed my hair, and I've burnt off arm hair," she said.

However, Witte said it's actually pretty hard to hurt yourself because usually, if you're just spinning and it bounces off you, it's not going to burn you because it's still just the fuel burning.

"The only way you can really hurt yourself is if you get wrapped up in poi, and then that's bad," she said. "For our performance troupe, we always had safeties around and codes and fire extinguishers in case someone got wrapped up and we would all dog-pile them."

Witte gathers up her sets of poi and leads me down to the Dunne basement -- her favorite place to practice -- for a lesson. She turns on techno music and tells me to start with parallel forward planes.

I try and come to realize what I had already assumed: that it is not as easy as it looks. My strings get wrapped up and smack me in the face, and then Witte pulls out her neon-streamer poi and manages to maneuver them easily without getting them tangled.

I can't wait to see Witte take on her next project: "I just got a fire hoop, which is a hula hoop with spokes for fire," she said. "It's pretty intense. I started training on that over the summer. There was a guy in my troupe that was really good at it. I decided to get myself an early birthday present."

Contact Kathleen Grohman at (408) 551-1918 or kgrohman@scu.edu.