Some Like It Hot

When Chelsea Cawley sets her tongue on fire, people watch with rapt attention. Holding a small, homemade torch in each hand, the 26-year-old opens her mouth wide and touches the end of one torch lightly to her tongue, blotting it with a coating of fuel.

With the torch in the other hand, she sets her tongue ablaze and sticks the flaming appendage out as far as she can. Some people in the audience scream, others cheer her on, but the majority just watch, spellbound, their own mouths hanging open.

"Chicks with fire," Chelsea says with a laugh, explaining the phenomenon. "It's just kind of a soft spot for a lot of people."

Chelsea, who performs under the stage name Jewn, has been fire dancing for five years. The flaming tongue feat is the highlight of an act that includes fire chains, fire-swallowing and "body lights," in which she drags a lit torch across her stomach, arms and back. Excess fuel from the torch is transferred onto her skin igniting it dramatically and, it must be said, erotically.

"The whole thing is pretty sexual, especially the fire swallowing and the body lights," she says. "It's a primal thing -- plus, I've got some pretty big tattoos and stuff."

Chelsea's fire routine, performed with a backdrop of deafening live music, is a world away from old-time fire entertainers like the legendary Barnello the Fire King, who also went by the names the Human Volcano and the Living Gas Jet. In Barnello's day, fire acts were the strict province of the carnival. Today, fire breathing and eating have emerged from the sideshow and, in the space of a handful of years, become a counterculture fad in which nearly anyone can -- and does -- participate.

If Barnello were to stroll by on a clear, windless Sunday night, he'd be amazed to see a spectacle of illuminated dance: people rhythmically spinning miniature meteors of fire that etch spectacular designs into the night; a fire breather spewing a 10-foot-long plume of orange flame; a dreadlocked dancer gracefully twirling a long staff, its ends ablaze. And not a circus tent in sight.

As a hobby, performance art or form of incendiary meditation, fire dancing is spreading worldwide, with a heated concentration on the United States' West Coast. Professional burn troupes Pyrogeist and Seeds of Fire make their home in the San Francisco Bay Area while Seattle boasts Cirque de Flambé and Thermogenesis. Hundreds of unaffiliated fire enthusiasts practice their art at parks and beaches, musical events, raves and festivals.

The most popular activity is fire spinning, also called poi, from the Maori word for ball (poi balls, sans fire, are an implement used in traditional Maori dance). Fire spinners swing two lengths of chain or cable with wicks attached to each end around their bodies. The pastime has caught on so fast that Seattle's famed Pyro Boy, Wally Glenn, dubbed it "the yo-yo of the new millennium."

"It really picked up two years ago," says Tom Kidwell, founding genius of juggling supply company Renegade Juggling. "We call them fire pixies," Kidwell says; "usually they're tattooed, pierced."

Renegade is headquartered in Santa Cruz, Calif. but supplies performers and hobbyists worldwide through its website, www.renegadejuggling.com. Kidwell says he's significantly expanded fire inventory in response to demand, doing a brisk trade in props like fire cables, fire staffs and dance torches -- which come with detailed fire safety information, dire warnings and recommendations for fire retardant jumpsuits.

Sparking a Trend

There's a good reason why we are instructed to yell "Fire" rather than "Help" when our lives are in peril. Fire is an attractor, a nearly narcotic visual force laden with potent symbolism. Combined with music and motion, it creates a dramatic, mesmerizing vision. Spectators can't take their eyes off those fiery orbs, licking brilliant tongues through the darkness, the intense heat and flame just inches away from scorching human flesh.