These Civic performers have made a sparkling career out of playing with fire

Kris Thiesfield has suffered burns a few times over the years – not too surprising for someone whose literal job is to play with fire.

Each night, he and Madison Young add the ‘fire’ to ‘Winter in the City: Fire and Ice’, an event run by the City Renewal Authority (CRA).

From now until 21 July, there’s ice-skating, snowmen building, and snowball fights available in Glebe Park as part of an effort to get Canberrans out enjoying the cold. At the same time in Garema Place, take in free-to-view fire performances courtesy of ‘Flux Entertainment’ to warm you up.

“We’re fire dancers,” Kris says.

“So we do fire spinning, fire performing, and then we’ve included our own handheld pyrotechnics in the shows as well, which is where we dance with fireworks coming out the ends of our props.”

They’re the only combination in the country to perform with live fireworks. In 2022, it earned Kris and Madison a place in the commercial for Channel 7’s Australia’s Got Talent.

“When we converse with people and explain to them that we dance with fireworks, often they don’t understand what we’re talking about. So being able to jump on TV and show people was really good,” Kris says.

The performances originate from ‘flow art’, a form of dance which Kris describes as “manipulating a prop to make it look good”.

“Learning different tricks and putting them all together in a smooth, flowing sequence,” he says.

“And it’s called ‘flow art’, because when you’re putting them all together, you enter ‘flow’ state, which is kind of like meditation in a way – once you’ve mastered the skills and transitions, it’s just you and the prop going from trick to trick almost mindlessly.”

Kris grew up in Brisbane and Madison in Sydney. Both now live on the Sunshine Coast.

They say there are plenty of workshops out there, not to mention YouTube videos “if you just want to pick up a prop and learn how to spin it”. Both started in informal “fire jams” just out of school.

“My friends around me started getting into fire performances,” Madison says.

“There was a weekly fire jam near where I grew up. I participated in that and was really inspired by the other fire spinners.”

It’s a similar story for Kris.

“Just out of school, I had people around me who were doing it, and I was learning off them. It’s just grown from there.”

About five years ago, the pair got together to form Flux Entertainment. They now light up corporate events, festivals, public activations (like this one in Canberra), birthdays, weddings and more with “close-proximity fireworks, high-energy fire shows, aerial acts, whip cracking acts, angle grinding acts, specialty act performers and more”.

It’s reached the point they’ve had to hire a crew of other fire performers to keep up with demand.

This July has been the pair’s biggest month on record with a total of 54 10-minute shows on the calendar.

“We’ve got a great audience here in Canberra,” Kris says.

“We haven’t done anything like this here before, so it’s been really good to come down to a city and activate it by doing what we love. We would definitely come back.”

“It’s so nice seeing the kids’ reactions – they just love the fire,” Madison says.

“We always hear them ask, ‘Is it real fire?'”

It’s definitely real. One act Kris and Madison prefer to leave to others is fire breathing – a “very complex, very dangerous” act where if things go wrong, “they go really wrong”.

“You put fuel in your mouth, and there’s a special technique to how you push the fuel out of your mouth without swallowing it or breathing it in, to create like a fine mist of flame,” Kris says.

As it is, Kris suffers enough burns.

“I think I get burnt more than Madison, which probably comes down to the whole male-female thing and guys typically taking bigger risks than women.”

The fire performances are held nightly in Garema Place from 5:30 pm, 6:30 pm and 7:30 pm, and each one is a little different.

More information is available on the Winter in the City website.