Fire Knife Dancing

If any of you have seen a Polynesian dance review I’m sure you have seen a display of Fire Knife Dancing. Young men dance to a trible drum beat banged out on biscuit tins while twirling, throwing and balancing flaming knife blades.

This is a dance that was begun in American Samoa. Surprisingly it wasn’t an age old Samoan tradition but is a recent invention by the now deceased Freddie Letuli. In the 1940s, while performing Polynesian dance at a Shriner’s convention in San Francisco he came up with the idea, you can check out this direct quote of his experience.

He designed the dance to incorporate certain types of moves, regulating competition to require safety features, knife and fuel specifications, and costume requirements. The competitions are held in Hawaii, American and Independent Samoa.

The Flaming Sword of Samoa-American Samoa World Fireknife Competition was last weekend. Most impressive is there very scarey graphic of a Fire Knife Dancer that is something similiar to an Ork from Lord of the Rings-yikes. There is both a Junior and Senior division-it was pretty cool to see Junior High kids doing this. Though we had to wait a long time on concrete bleachers for the dancing to start, I was pretty impressed. Initially, I was a little nonplused to see that we were sitting directly behind a chain-link fence obscuring the view, until Jay pointed out that sharp knives with fire were going to be hurtled through the air. Suddenly I was not too concerned, and in fact, grateful for the fence.

Here are a few videos of the competition. There are more on my new utube website if you’d like to check them out. If you’d like to learn this at home feel free to invest in knives that you can buy online for a couple hundred bucks-just don’t burn down your home. There are good guidelines for learning Fire Knife Dancing by this American Samoan Fire Knife organization (for example learning your moves with a broomstick before using flaming, sharp things-brilliant!). Once all of you have it down we will start our own stateside Palagi Fire Knife Dancing Troup and tour the world.