SaFire Full Bio

SaFire is the owner of SaFire Dance: Circus and Fire Entertainment as well as the creator and moderator of Hoop City™. Her journey here began in the summer of 2006 when she saw fire poi and immediately became interested in the fire arts and in prop manipulation. When exposed to hooping while at Shambhala she quickly became obsessed with all things hooping. After completing six years of post-secondary education at the University of Lethbridge, SaFire decided to focus her attention on performance and fire dancing. Graduating with a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 2007, SaFire relocated to Edmonton, Alberta where she began working as a performer, hoop dance instructor and motivational speaker.

Choosing to step aside from teaching in the public school system but with a burning desire to work with youth, SaFire created a 45 minute presentation called Inspire Through Fire, a motivational presentation for K-12 students. The presentation was created to share her passion of fire performance and encourage young people to dream dangerously, ignore the nay sayers and forget the bullies they will encounter in life.

In February, 2008 SaFire published her first hooping demo on YouTube. Several weeks later she entered the video into the dance category of a talent contest run through Clipstar.com. The contest semi-finals ran for several months and had a preliminary prize of $10,000 with a grand prize of $1,000,000. When the semi-finals finished, SaFire’s video had won and was entered into the finals. Unfortunately the Clipstar finals were cancelled and the grand prize contest never occurred. The video however still holds a strong place in the viral video world, has been featured on various video sites and has a combined an increasing viewer count of well over 4,000,000 people worldwide.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/3535338 w=600&h=450]

With a desire to share the hoop, SaFire created a series of hooping tutorials and published them on her YouTube Channel. The tutorials were met with a tremendous amount of positive feedback for their detailed and easy to understand instructions. Her unofficial hoop students voiced their appreciation in January 2009 when she was voted Hoop Instructor of the Year through Hooping.org’s Hoopie Awards. After dozens of requests from hoopers to release an instructional DVD SaFire searched for a method to instruct online. In early 2009, Hoop City was launched where she was finally able to put her education degree and technology specialization into action by creating some of the first online hooping classes available. The classes have been a huge success and currently include over 700 students worldwide. In addition to the online hooping classes, Hoop City has a strong online presence as a community for hoopers to connect, share ideas and locate other hoopers in their area. The community currently has over 6,000 members and is growing daily.

Future plans for SaFire include running a multi-prop festival in Alberta, traveling around the world and publishing a Children’s storybook about Hula Hooping.