Local Fire Dancer Lights the Way for Carlsbad’s Next Generation of Performance Artists

By R. Gabriel Villalobos

Shannon Marie Newton has been fire dancing for a quarter century, and she still talks about it like a privilege she hasn’t finished earning.

Newton, head of the theater department at Southeast New Mexico College, recently performed at the Cavern City Renaissance Festival, where she balanced swords, spun fire, and proved the art form remains a crowd favorite.

When talking to her, one notices she spends far more time talking about the performers she hopes to train than what she has already accomplished in the discipline.

“I have been doing fire dancing for at least 25 years,” Newton said. Her start came through a performance troop that staged rock-and-roll-themed skits. “We had a little tribe of girls, and one of them was a fire spinner and a fire eater, and so she taught me the art of it.”

From there, Newton kept expanding her toolkit: poi, dragon staff, fire katana, sword balancing, and fire balancing among them. She brought a dancer’s background to all of it, having trained in ballet, tap, jazz, and circus. She had been dancing since age five. Flexibility, she said, “got me a long way.”

Despite all she had accomplished as a performer, the body that once made everything easy eventually forced her to start over. After a couple of years sidelined by injury, Newton said she didn’t reach her physical prime until her late 40s.

“I had to kind of learn to use my body all over again,” she said. She didn’t perform her first headstand until her 40s, and many of the acts audiences saw at the Renaissance Festival are new skills she developed in that later chapter.

Performing fire for 25 minutes straight is punishing, Newton said, and the hardest part isn’t the flame. “It’s not just the roller coaster of the emotions of the crowd,” she said. “It’s also the roller coaster of my energy and being able to persevere to perform for those 25 minutes straight.”

That intensity is why Newton treats fire performance as a rite of passage rather than a party trick. “It’s a rite of passage, and it isn’t handed off lightly,” she said. “You have to learn a lot of very technical things before you get to do it.”

She points to a sword-balancing act at a circus camp show that went sideways, not from lack of practice, but from too much adrenaline. “Your excitement takes over; your adrenaline takes over,” she said. “Then you lose that discipline and focus that it takes to be able to complete the act.”

That lesson shapes how she teaches. Newton said fire dancing isn’t the immediate goal for her students. Confidence on stage, reading an audience, and achieving comfort while speaking come first. These skills, she said, are easily learned through theater.

“Being a teacher is certainly my calling in life,” she noted. “I hope to be able to guide these students on a healthy path in entertainment and performance, cuz there are a lot of dangerous things out there, and I had to learn them the hard way.”

She’s also building something bigger. Newton is developing “Enchanted by Carlsbad,” which she describes as a performance art piece blending speaking, aerial dance, and bungee. Eight acts are fully written and designed. The opening scene envisions a singer hidden inside a roughly 20-foot costume that expands like a hurricane of bats. The costume is built in part from drones from the college’s new drone soccer program, disguised as the flying mammals.

The story, she said, isn’t about her, though it traces how she landed in Carlsbad after living in six states. “It’s about the bats and the caverns and Sitting Bull,” she said. “But it’s also about the people here, because the people of Carlsbad are what really made me want to stay.”

Newton hopes to stage the production next year, but first she needs a team. She plans to recruit from dance studios, jiujitsu gyms, and cheer and tumble programs around town, where athletes often stop performing after graduation. Aerial and bungee dance, she said, offer them a way to convert that athleticism into a new art form.

“I’m not ready to pass the torch,” Newton said, “but I am seeing the potential of the future generation who can take this art and make it something special for Carlsbad. They’re nowhere near ready. I’m just seeing those stars start to come out and shine, and I’m ready to polish them.”

For those who want to start now, Newton said the theater department always needs cast and crew, with crew members helping with lights and props. The next show begins on December 4 and is already rehearsing. Registration for spring semester opens on October 3, and she’ll teach two costume-making classes and one movement-for-theater course. The costume classes go beyond tradition, she said, using cosplay materials with puppetry built into costumes and automated wings.

Her parting advice to anyone drawn to performance: explore movement and take the art seriously. “I just really hope that students will reach out to whatever they’re inspired by,” she said. “I hope that they will find pieces of themselves through exploring performing arts.”