Baining Fire Dance

The fire is built big on purpose. By the time the men’s voices start, it is a heap of logs in a cleared space in the hills of the Gazelle Peninsula, throwing heat in a wide circle and light no further than the edge of the forest. Then something comes out of the dark that is taller than a man and has the face of a leaf. Its eyes are enormous, ringed in red and black, and they do not blink. It walks straight into the flames, and the logs burst under its feet like struck flint.

This is the night dance of the Baining, the people of the mountainous, forested interior of the Gazelle Peninsula at the eastern end of New Britain, in Papua New Guinea. Outsiders call it the fire dance. The Baining have their own names for it, and they differ by group: curators working with the Kairak and Uramot Baining record it as atut, while the Horniman Museum’s notes give miaus or langani. An older English name was the snake dance, because the dancers once carried live venomous snakes. Flaming torches have since taken over that part of the show, which most people consider an improvement.

Baining ceremony comes in two halves, and the night dance only makes sense next to the other one. The day dances belong to the women’s side of life. They are held every two or three years, they deal with death, mourning, gardens and fertility, and their towering mandas masks are understood as feminine. The anthropologist George A. Corbin, writing in 1982, described one of them, the Rarapka, as carrying a superstructure more than three metres tall, moving slowly to suggest the growth of garden trees and plants. The night dance is the reverse in nearly every respect. Its music comes from a male orchestra, its masks are worn only by men, and it faces outward, toward the bush and what lives there.

What lives there, in Baining understanding, is a crowd of spirits, and each one is attached to something specific. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds kavat masks collected by Corbin in 1972 and 1973, notes that several dozen forms exist, each depicting a spirit linked with a particular animal, plant, product or activity of the forest. One mask in the Met carries a triangular crest representing the shoulder bone of a pig. Another has a split top, which marks it as a spirit associated with the forks of trees. The Horniman’s kavat is a rengit, a bird-like leaf spirit that lives up in the trees and comes down to the ground to dance, and a mask in Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is the rengit again, an edible leaf, with fern-like eyes, a pattern of cut leaves across the forehead, and snakes and centipedes painted on its face. A Geneva collection lists spirits of the butterfly, the mosquito and the taro. Nobody would mistake this for a pantheon. It is closer to a census of the forest.

The spirits choose their own form. According to Isabelle Tassignon of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, they appear to initiated men in dreams and ask to be given life in a mask. The men then build it. Bamboo makes the skeleton and rattan can bind it. Bark from particular trees is beaten into cloth, laid over the frame while wet and left to tighten as it dries in the sun. The colours come from the body as much as from the forest: black from a resin chewed and mixed with saliva, red from saliva stained with betel. The eyes are the signature, set in concentric rings of red and black so that they seem to stare from much further back than the mask could hold. In some places the most elaborate form, the vungvung, adds trumpet-like extensions and a long bamboo pole.

The building is also teaching. Boys are taken into the forest to meet the spirits through the masks, help to make them, and learn what each pattern and design means and how a mask should be danced. That knowledge belongs to initiated men and stays with them, passed from father to son.

On the night itself, women and children who have not been initiated dance around the fire first. Then the masked dancers come in, painted black and wrapped in leaves, and the dance runs until sunrise. The male chorus grows faster and harder as the hours go on. The dancers leap over the flames, run straight through them and kick the burning logs, sending up clouds of embers into the dark. Every so often a spirit breaks away from the fire and goes after the spectators, and the women and children scatter. It is hard, frightening work for everyone, which seems to be the idea.

Isaac Kaligur, an elder from Kainagunan who made masks for the Queensland Art Gallery in 2011, gave the plainest account of what it is for: the masked men invite dangerous bush spirits into the village to placate them, so that they can then be driven off. The Horniman puts the same thing from the other side, as a celebration of the special connection senior Baining men have with the powerful spirits of the bush. Both readings agree on the main point. The spirits are real, they are not tame, and the dance is how a village makes room for them for exactly one night.

Then the masks burn. Traditionally they were made for a single performance and thrown into the same fire when it was over, because the spirit’s presence stays in them. That is why old Baining masks are rare in museums. Things changed in the 1970s, when the night dances were revived for both local audiences and tourists, and masks began to be kept and sold. One mask in the Queensland Art Gallery was made around 1994 to welcome an Australian tour operator, Geoff Murphy, and his family, and it carries the Australian coat of arms copied from a fifty-cent coin, painted right in the middle of its forehead. The forest spirits had evidently decided to be polite to the guests.

Gregory Bateson spent 1927 and 1928 among the Baining, though his field notes went unpublished. The fullest modern account of their social world is Jane Fajans’s They Make Themselves (1997). Today Baining fire dancers are among the biggest attractions at the National Mask Festival in Kokopo, and the dance keeps doing what it has always done, even with an audience holding cameras. The fire is lit. The men sing. Something with a leaf for a face comes out of the trees, and for a few hours nobody in the clearing is quite sure who owns the night.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Baining fire dance?

The Baining fire dance is the night dance of the Baining people of the Gazelle Peninsula in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Masked men, painted black and dressed in leaves, dance through the night around a large fire, running through the flames and kicking the burning logs. The masks represent spirits of the forest.

What do the Baining kavat masks represent?

Each kavat mask represents a particular forest spirit linked to an animal, plant, product or activity of the bush. Museum examples include a spirit of the forks of trees, a spirit shown with the shoulder bone of a pig, and the rengit, a bird-like leaf spirit. Several dozen kavat forms are known.

Why do the Baining dance through fire?

According to Baining elder Isaac Kaligur, the masked men invite dangerous bush spirits into the village to placate them so that they can then be driven off. The fire lights the masked spirits through the night, and the dancers leap over it and kick its embers as part of the performance.

Why was it called the snake dance?

The Baining night dance was once known as the snake dance because the dancers carried live venomous snakes. In more recent performances flaming torches have taken the place of the snakes, which is why it is now usually called the fire dance.

What happens to the masks after the dance?

Traditionally Baining night dance masks were made for a single performance and burned in the same fire afterwards, because the spirit’s presence remained in them. Since the dances were revived in the 1970s for local and tourist audiences, some masks have been kept and sold to collectors and museums.

Related Entries

Masalai, Afek, Kilibob (Kulbob), Tudava, Adiri, Qat, Tagaro, Marawa, Adaro, Egungun, Ngillatun