Fire-breathers look to ignite interest with workshop’s launch near Midtown
Instructors open 4-part class that mixes physics, illusion for performance
Jandro Herdocia likes to practice his fire-breathing in the shower.
Not because it’s safer or less likely to end in burns — but just because it’s one of the best places for developing new tricks.
“The trick to fire-breathing is you have to mist the fuel,” said the 33-year-old fire-arts instructor. “We train our lip muscles.”
That means a lot of spitting and spewing — sometimes with mineral oil fuel and sometimes with shower water — to try out patterns that might work for new fiery displays. It takes a lot of practice and a little charring to work out just the right combination of breath, fuel and flames.
“You’re essentially manipulating an element of nature,” said fellow fire-flow artist Y.E. Torres. “It’s a little bit of an illusion game, a little bit of a physics.”
But now Torres and Herdocia are pulling back the curtain on the illusion just a touch with newly launched fire-breathing and fireeating classes hosted in an arty warehouse near Midtown.
Though the Bayou City performers have been teaching fire arts for years at festivals and gatherings across the country, their four-workshop series is the first time they’ve offered fire-breathing instruction in the Houston area.
And, in case you’re wondering, it’s just a dangerous as it seems — but not for the reasons you might expect.
“Fire-eating is extremely cancerous and kills you slowly,” Herdocia
said. “Fire-breathing has the potential to kill you very quickly.”
Repeatedly ingesting the fuel needed to eat fire — and spit it back out — can cause tooth decay and cancer, Herdocia said. But accidentally inhaling the fuels used in fire-breathing can cause chemical pneumonia, “which can kill you very quickly,” he said. But what about burns? “That’s what most people think,” said Herdocia, better known by his stage name, Jandro Fuego. “But most people who burn their face fire-breathing are using the wrong fuels.”
The classes held at The Interchange start with a focus on safety, outlining the best equipment and safest fuels to use, and going over all the likely missteps and mishaps.
Participants are instructed to wear natural fiber clothing, garments that will burn instead of melt. They learn how to fuel torches and manage the temperature, deftly passing the flame back and forth from torch to torch before the metal gets too hot to touch.
And immediately after each two-hour class, they learn to clean their mouths and change their clothes promptly — before the fuel-soaked rags can spark an unpleasant case of dermatitis. From start to finish, there’s an eye to safety in what both instructors acknowledge can be a clearly unsafe pastime.
“You’re playing with fire. You do get burned — it happens,” Torres said. “Most people who spin, breathe or play with fire get worse burns cooking.”
Thanks in part to the ease of learning and trading tips in online communities, fire arts seem to have spread in recent years, Herdocia said.
“There’s now four times as many fire-breathers in Texas as there were four years ago,” Torres said.
It’s already popular in some cities outside of Texas, like Nashville, Tenn., and New York — but fire flow is still a developing art form here.
“There’s pockets of fire all over the place,” Torres said. “But it’s been our goal to bring up fire theater in Houston.”