Last week we talked a bit about the history of the different props that have become a part of the Flow Arts world. Today, we’re going to talk about how the Flow Arts emerged from a wide range of diverse sources, including festival culture, philosophy, and the emergence of the internet.

I think it’s fair to say that one of the most powerful events that led to the formation of the modern flow arts happened when modern day fire spinning was born in 1946 when a Samoan Knife Dancer named Freddie Letuli borrowed elements of a fire eater’s act to incorporate into his own at a Shriner’s convention. His act was a massive hit! He went on to star in several movies and perform all over the world. He also started a tradition that would eventually become a core element of the Flow Arts world: converting a prop for use with fire.

Circus was also undergoing a massive series of changes. Concerns of animal welfare and changing audience tastes had led to dwindling attendance in the latter part of the twentieth century. By the 1970s, a new generation of performers shed many of the traditional elements of circus to put acrobats, dancers, and jugglers together into a new type of show, dubbed cirque nouveau or contemporary circus. Instead of a multiple ring venue that featured dozens of acts developed within families of performers, nouveau cirque took artists trained in formal schools and integrated them tightly into a theatrical context that featured cohesive themes or narrative.

The most famous example of this new approach to circus is Montreal-based entertainment company Cirque du Soleil, which popularized the use of aerial silks, though hundreds of other companies and troupes all over the world also make use of the genre.

In the 1980s, juggling went through a radical shift thanks to the work of MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Michael Moschen. Moschen combined juggling with dance and performance art to create performances that employed a diverse range of different props, pushing the boundaries of what was considered a prop and how a performer could move with it. Many of Moschen’s innovations, including contact juggling and S-staves, are still a fixture of the flow arts world to this day.

Meanwhile the worlds of juggling and mathematics were merging as a system for juggling notation, called siteswap, was developed simultaneously by teams in the United States and the UK. The innovation led both to easier methods for disseminating information about different juggling patterns as well as systems for developing new ones.

One of the major actors that introduced prop spinning to a wider audience was the jam band The String Cheese Incident. One of the hallmarks of their live performances was throwing adult-sized hula hoops into the audience, inviting them to hoop to the music. One such fan was a woman named Anah Reichenbach who would popularize hooping for adults under the label “hoop dance” to distinguish it from the hula hoops that most children play with.

For most of the latter part of the 20th century, there were a wide variety of performance traditions with various props that were more or less isolated from each other, but this began to change with the emergence of large-scale counter-culture events and music festivals.

One major example was the Burning Man Arts Festival here in the United States. Burning Man and other transformational events attracted artists and performers from all over the world and mixed them in with average folk who had an open mind and a love for trying new things. It also encouraged a type of performance that blurred the lines between professional and amateur, performer and audience.

Attendees to these events would seek to learn how to take up these performance styles and take them home to work on in their spare time. These people then planted the seeds for emerging communities all over the country that would make fire spinning and eventually unlit prop spinning a tool creating social networks as well as personal fulfillment.

In many ways, you can think of the Flow Arts as being something like an uprooted tree, with threads of martial arts, dance, circus, and other arts all converging into not just an art, but also a philosophy and then diverging back again in a variety of different directions. These threads converge on a shared set of values that includes an open source, collaborative style of innovation, the use of props for social and recreational purposes, and finally an emphasis on personal or group meditation through prop spinning.

As these communities grew, so too did their demand for safe props and new ways to connect with other people.

One example was a company called Infinity Toys, founded by Kurt Sonderegger. In addition to producing a line of consumer poi called Zuni poi, he also started a series of social meetups for people interested in spinning props. This reframed prop spinning as a social activity rather than a sport or performance art. It was through these meetups, called Spin Jams, that many of the people who would later become a part of San Francisco’s burgeoning Flow Arts scene would meet and become inspired and the idea was exported to other communities all over the country.

In 1998, Home of Poi was founded in Christchurch, New Zealand. In addition to fire spinning supplies, the company posted video tutorials on its site and hosted a forum system that was a place for people all over the world to exchange ideas, becoming the center of the world’s fire spinning culture for the better part of a decade. Meanwhile in the United States, Hooping.org was founded in 2003 both as on online forum and content aggregator for the emerging hooping community.

In Europe, this type of synthesis was occurring at juggling and circus festivals, which swelled to attendance in the tens of thousands. The European Juggling Convention, staged yearly in different cities across Europe, has become an annual pilgrimage for prop spinners and fire dancers from all over the world.

Then, in 2004, a festival was started in California called Firedrums. It was an event that was different from the ones that came before it in that it focused completely on fire spinning. During the day, attendees went to workshops taught by professional performers or teachers traveling from abroad. At night, the event featured a “fire circle” in which attendees could spin fire without any formal schedule, stage, or requirements, making it a social event rather than a performance. It was a model that was soon repeated at other locations all over the United States and eventually the world, offering weekend-long retreats to hobbyists who took up the art. A full list and calendar of these events can be found on my website.

As this culture of hobby fire spinners expanded, they shifted the focus of studying these movement arts from developing acts or creating performances to spinning purely for the sake of enjoying the experience of it.

Amid this change, the concept of “flow” began to take root in this community. The concept is borrowed from the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who sought to describe the state of losing oneself completely in a task. For many of these hobbyists, the point of spinning a prop was to find your “flow,” to lose yourself completely in the act of spinning, whether with fire or not.

At the same time, the rise of social media began allowing independent content creators to find an audience. One of the biggest shifts happened in 2005 with the founding of YouTube.

The price of video cameras dropped rapidly and broadband internet became more widely available, leading to an explosive growth in prop spinning videos on the platform. This created a generation of YouTube stars including Nick Woolsey, Zan Moore, and MCP who went on to travel and teach all over the world.

One of the most influential stars of this social media revolution was “Burning” Dan Gordon-Levitt, a fire dancer from Los Angeles who approached spinning not just as a performance art or a hobby, but as a philosophy with tangible benefits to the psyche. Sadly, Burning Dan passed away in 2010 but lives on as one of the most influential figures in the emergence of the Flow Arts.

Flow Artists today use a huge variety of props, including poi, hoop, staves, fans, rope darts, swords, whips, the list goes on and on and keeps expanding every year. They’ve even invented brand new props or found new twists on old ones, such as puppy hammers or levi wands.

The use of the term Flow Arts as a label and the philosophy are most popular in the United States. In many other parts of the world, the philosophical split associated with the Flow Arts never occurred, so the practice of spinning with props is still focused on performance and in most cases is considered an offshoot of circus or part of Nouveau Cirque.

There are also many Flow Artists who wish to bring their art back into a more formal setting and are working to reintegrate themselves with the circus or juggling world.

As of last year, the Fire and Flow Festival circuit includes more than fifty events around the world that cater to up to 15,000 attendees. The top 10 flow arts-related channels on YouTube have collectively amassed more than 65 million views and over 300,000 subscribers. Glow prop manufacturer Flowtoys was featured on the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies in 2015.

Where did you first hear about the Flow Arts? Let me know in the comments. Next week we’ll be talking specifically about fire spinning and its role in Flow Arts culture, including some basic information on safety practices.

Sources:
http://goo.gl/OHno9S
http://www.hooping.org/hula-hoop-history/