Update 5/30/2022: So my thinking on this has changed dramatically in the past couple years and I now realize many of the conclusions I arrived at in this article were a result of sampling bias. For my current thoughts on this issue, check out this video.

The original article is still preserved below without edits for both transparency and accountability.

The flow arts community has seen an explosion in popularity in within the past 5 years and perhaps no metric is more telling of this expansion than the proliferation of festivals devoted to spinning and fire arts. As recently as 5 years ago, there were only 4 options to attend in the United States and this year there were nearly 50. As this aspect of our culture has continued to proliferate, however, it has generated with it a great deal of controversy as to what type of compensation those who contribute to it are entitled to. The current model for most festivals is that a certain percentage of teachers are given travel stipends that cover either all or most of their travel costs to the event and are then given a comp ticket to attend. These festivals also rely on voluntary labor to prepare the grounds, schedule events, handle event admittance, and sometimes feed their attendees.

So given that teachers are essentially giving away their labor for free, shouldn’t they get paid a respectable wage for their contributions to a festival?

Earlier this year, Pacific Fire Gathering sold out and by doing so, it confirmed something about the economics of the fire festivals that I’d long suspected. It did this by selling out before the full list of teachers was made public. This means that for those purchasing tickets to the event, the teaching lineup wasn’t a consideration in their purchase.

In other words: the value each teacher adds to a festival is essentially nothing. We’re not underpaid for our contributions...we’re overpaid. To understand why, let’s take a look at some basic economics.

Understanding the Economics

One of the most basic elements of economic theory is what’s called a supply and demand graph. The idea is that any resource for which there is a high demand but low supply tends to become valuable--people are willing to pay more to acquire it. At the opposite end are resources for which there is a high level of supply but low demand, which tend to be worth less overall.

A great example of this principle in action comes from the Washington Monument here in DC. Originally, it was capped with an aluminum spire, which was one of the most valuable metals in the world in 1884 when the monument was completed. The reason for this is that aluminum, though it doesn’t rust, is also very difficult to find in its native form in Earth’s crust. Like silver, it became a highly sought-after luxury item as a result due to its low supply and high demand. Two years after the monument’s dedication, however, a chemical process was invented that extracted the metal from bauxite, one of the Earth’s most common minerals, and the price of aluminum fell overnight to the point that now there is so much of it we use it as a container for soft drinks.

What does this have to do with teachers at fire festivals? Well, to give you an idea I’ll give you some stats for FLAME Festival, the one I help run, based near Atlanta, GA. This year, we had 134 teachers apply to teach at the festival. We had room on the schedule for only 44 of them--less than ⅓ of those that applied. Of those 44 teachers, 16 were willing to teach without any form of compensation whatsoever. We probably could have had more teachers that weren’t compensated, but we crowdsourced our schedule. Many other festivals do follow this path.

Here, the resource in limited supply is not the teachers themselves, but the slots for them to teach in. Hence, the teaching slot is more valuable than the teacher.

There is, however, another variable in play when it comes to the value of a teacher: the amount that a festival attendee is willing to pay to learn from them. Here, once again the market doesn’t bear out in a teacher’s favor. Aside from the aforementioned example of PacFire selling out before it made it’s full teacher lineup public, there are the results of a survey I sent around last year.

You Get What You Pay For

Last year, I created and shared a survey that was meant to be a demographic study of flow arts participants to see who actually made up our community--and yes, I know I was meant to publish the results of it but I am one person doing it part time and there is more data than I know what to do with. One thing did jump out to me, however, as I was doing preliminary tallies. This was the motivation people reported for buying a ticket to an event.

People were allowed to check off as many options as they liked, but the overwhelming majority selected options that had nothing to do with the teacher lineup, which was listed dead last among the options we offered. More than twice as many people listed the ticket price of an event as being a deciding factor in whether they would go or not. In other words: festival goers by and large aren’t willing to pay more in order to see their favorite teachers get paid.

There are a couple exceptions to this rule, of course: anecdotal evidence has shown me that quite a number of people who weren’t originally going decided to purchase tickets to Firedrums this past year when juggling superstar Wes Peden was announced as an instructor. This is another great case of supply and demand in action, however. Peden doesn’t attend fire festivals and is unlikely to change this habit in the future. He is a performer that has incredible name recognition and respect and has attained an unparalleled level of virtuosity in his particular field. In other words, there is greater demand for his services than there is supply right now. The same is not true of most of the other flow arts. Aside from international spinners, there is no shortage in supply of poi, hoop, staff, fan, or many other types of spinners here in the US. Nor are there spinners whose level of virtuosity or name recognition gains them the kind of exceptionalism that Peden commands.

It should also be said that given conversations I’ve had with members of the Firedrums workshop team, that Peden’s involvement was almost certainly a moonshot--a one-off use of exceptional resources to make a very special event happen. The only flow artist I can think of that would command a comparable use of resources might be Nick Woolsey, but part of the problem with the proliferation of our art is that nearly all of us are easily replaceable. If we can’t make an event, there’s a line several people deep wanting to take our spot.

It doesn’t help matters that even if they’re not given a spot to teach at a festival, many prospective teachers will then purchase a ticket to attend anyway. Thus, the festival more or less gets the same value add from them and receives more money for it.

The problem here isn’t that festivals are penny-pinching misers hell-bent on profiting at the expense of their hard-working teachers, it’s that they’re responding to market pressures brought on by the demographic they’re catering to. The teacher pool is largely undifferentiated and unexceptional and the value of the festival more or less is the immersion into flow arts culture for the weekend. DJ lineups for festivals account for slightly more of an incentive for festival goers to buy tickets, yet the pool of potential DJs is much smaller than the pool of potential teachers and thus they are much more likely to be paid for their efforts. Festival goers favor location and ticket price over teacher lineup and teachers are either willing to pay to teach or just pay to attend. There is absolutely no variable in this situation that incentivizes the festivals to pay their teachers anything at all--quite frankly, the availability of travel stipends is probably far greater than the value add any of the teachers they bring in actually contributes to the festival.

In Defense of Teaching

I want to be clear: I am a teacher and I want to get paid. I also realize the impossibility of this in the current economic climate. I don’t believe that my contributions are worthless, but I also know that there are a long line of kids waiting to take my slots should I sit out a festival. Also: given that I travel and teach so much I realize I’m also kind of shooting myself in the foot because the value of my teaching lessens with each additional festival I put on my schedule. The part of this that makes me saddest of all is that teaching is the thing I love the most about being a flow artist. I love seeing the way it changes lives and empowers people. I also know that few people put any value on good teachers. Our culture has embraced a kind of social egalitarianism that seems to hold that anybody can and should teach--the only qualification being that you have a move that someone else is interested in acquiring. That the failure of a student to acquire a skill is that they either can’t due to difficulty or they require that one “a ha” moment to break through...blame is never placed on a teacher for their failure to adapt to different students, learning styles, or even to present their material in a clear manner. When the onus is on the student to learn rather than the teacher to teach, it is a clear statement that the latter is considered to have no value.

I have made a living as a teacher in our culture not by teaching, but by selling other things people actually have placed a value on, namely sets of poi or t-shirts. I’ve known many other teachers who’ve responded to these market pressures by diversifying their offerings to other niches for which there is greater demand and less competition and thus, an income is possible. Many have gone the route of selling props or other swag, DJing events, or doing things like leading fire walks. I have a feeling that many more will go down routes such as these in the next few years as well.

How Can We Fix It?

So how can this possibly change? The first and most obvious answer is that it will change when one or more festivals loses ticket sales for not compensating their teachers. There are plenty of examples of markets in which people will pay a greater amount for a product that reflects their personal values rather than just the cheapest. Organic food, Apple products, and designer clothing all are investments I’ve seen people in the flow community make where they pay a premium on something they otherwise wouldn’t have to. The same would have to occur in the fire festival market to make any kind of impact. Most of the festivals already work on a shoestring budget, so ticket prices would likely have to go up to cover teachers.

It’s a small potential change, but having people who plan to attend a festival buy their tickets early actually is a huge incentive to festivals to make big investments in improving the experience of being there, including recruiting teachers. Few attendees realize that the festivals are usually running in the red up until the week before when most people wait to buy their tickets. The festivals rarely make enough of a profit to be able to cover all their expenditures out of pocket for a given year, so by waiting to purchase their tickets most of the attendees are actually cutting off the festivals’ capacity to make investments such as this.

Could teachers strike? I think it’s unlikely to make a difference given how many there are out there. One teacher takes a year off and it hurts their career more than it does the festivals--they don’t get the face time or get exposed to new ideas.

Last year we attempted a system at FLAME Festival wherein we crowdfunded donations for teachers after the festival to compensate them for their work. The reaction was mixed from teachers enraged that they had to beg their students for compensation to people glad that some value was being put on their contributions. In a way, it was a method of directly reminding the attendees that their buying habits had the greatest influence on a teacher’s income: if they weren’t willing to pay another $5 to support a teacher after the fact, how could we raise their ticket price to give all the teachers $5? While they state a given preference, their buying habits don’t actually reflect it.

Will protesting this system make a difference? Again, unless it actually leads to fewer ticket sales (and I’ve seen nothing that convinces me that it will--like teachers there’s always someone else in line to buy a ticket) all the durm and strang will likely make little difference. It’s also somewhat farcical in that a customer is essentially demanding festivals do more with less income while being unwilling to subsidize the changes they’re demanding.

I want to make something abundantly clear: the value of teachers is nothing not because they don't do anything of value. The value of teachers is nothing because the market puts no value on what they do.

It’s not a popular answer, but the ultimate solution to this problem lies with you, dear reader. If you want festivals to pay their teachers (or any other volunteers), your spending habits have to reflect this value. Otherwise, the festivals have absolutely no incentive to do so and whatever protest you may launch to demand change comes off as little more than a paper tiger. Back your beliefs with your wallet. The festivals are already spending more than they have to on this element of our culture.

Edit 11/11 1:00 PM: In all intellectual honesty, there is actually one other thing that would change this system and it would be to have the teachers offer an experience to their students that is unique and valuable--in other words to become so good at teaching that their value is unquestionable. The question is: is it more likely that teachers will improve the experience they offer or festival goers will be willing to pay higher ticket prices to compensate instructors?