Jake Paganakis and Brian Miller are standing on a hill on the west side of Oakwood Cemetery. It’s a cool 55 degrees outside, just past 10:30 p.m., a perfect night to spin fire.

They don’t want money. They won’t ask for a crowd. They don’t need to — one will come. Shadow figures make their way to the boys in the cemetery, following the light of the twirling flames and forming a crowd as they always have, Miller said.

“The first time I spun fire in front of a crowd was my first time spinning fire,” Paganakis said. “It’s meditative. When you’re spinning fire, you create a space that’s just your own. You create this space where it’s just you and your fire.”

Both Miller, a junior wildlife biology major from Marlboro, New Jersey and Paganakis, a sophomore studying sustainable energy management from Brooklyn, New York, began to fire twirl before becoming students at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

A self-described beach bum, Miller swings and flails, like the way his body moves on the surfboard off the coast of his hometown. He doesn’t follow a set pattern — he flows to the beat of EDM and house music, his favorite. Paganakis is more reserved, with his movements more thought out. His knees bend and back arches; it’s slow and definitive, like the classical music on his iPhone.

Miller picked up fire twirling at the Camp Bisco music festival in 2013. Paganakis was introduced by one of his best friends Ben Freedmon-Peel three years ago.

They spun on a corner of East River Park, which goes up most of the east side of Manhattan, said Freedmon-Peel, a student at The Academy of the Art University in San Francisco.

“The cops didn’t bother us there,” he said. “Sometimes they would just choose to not pay attention. We had our spot, we had our time and as long as we were out of the park by midnight, we were fine.”

In the park, the crowds gathered. Drunken passengers on party boats would yell from the bow and runners pacing through the trails would cut workouts short to stop and watch the fire swirl. With Freedmon-Peel in California now, Paganakis spins with Miller. The two met in September, when Paganakis saw Miller spinning in the SUNY-ESF quad.

They specialize in different forms. Paganakis prefers to spin staff, a well-balanced metal tube with Kevlar wraps at each end, because it’s light enough that it’s easy to control and manipulate. Miller spins poi, which involves tethered weights on chain link tails.

“The first time I lit them up I was very nervous,” Miller said. “When you’re not spinning them, the balls are on fire and the flames gush up and you’re sitting there holding these giant balls of fire. Then you think, ‘OK, now I’m going to swing these giant balls of fire around my head and body.’”

Safety is a concern, though the extent of the danger goes so far as a loose hair catching fire, they said. The first time Miller spun, he lit the ends of his long hair on fire.

Other than a few singed hairs and minor burn marks that have since disappeared, the two remain mostly unscarred.

“I feel like a lot of people think it’s a lot more dangerous than it actually is,” Paganakis said. “To show people that it’s not that bad, I take my staff and I hit myself with it real quick.”

He will also put oil on his hand, light it on fire, then light the other end of the staff just to show that he’ll be OK, he said.

For Paganakis, spinning won’t turn into a job. He dreams of working at the United Nations as an environmental correspondent and help developing nations establish sustainable energy programs.

Miller wants a job that will let him travel and do what he calls “the good work” — outdoor work. National Geographic would be perfect for that, he said. But if spinning turns into a career, he’ll be open to it.

In the cemetery, Miller spins countless rotations of a figure eight, swinging to the rhythm of Riva Starr’s 2009 rave hit, “I Was Drunk.”

With just enough room, a few steps behind him, Paganakis goes in and out of the song. He prefers to spin to the classics. Lindsey Stirling and Frank Sinatra are high on his list of favorites, with the soundtrack to the anime “Cowboy Bebop” taking the top spot.

He can spin to anything, though, as he does in front of Moon Library, in the alley behind the Brooklyn brownstone he grew up in or in a cemetery overlooking the western half of Syracuse.

As the beat quickens, the spinning follows. The fireballs on the ends of the poi chains light up Miller’s slim figure, revealing slices of a green shirt, a baseball cap and basketball shorts.

While the crowd looks on, the spinners acknowledge that they would never try to spin for money. People gather to watch, as they always do, especially on a night like this.

“When you’re spinning, it’s like an extension of your body,” Miller said. “It’s really just you and your fire. You flow with it and feel it. It’s almost like you’re dancing. I almost forget people are watching sometimes because when you’re spinning, you create that little circle of fire and nothing outside of that circle of fire matters.”

Published on April 14, 2015 at 8:47 pm

Contact: kasotelo@syr.edu