Construction worker by day, fire-knife dancer by night

Minutes after he soaks part of a school construction site in an effort to control dust in the northwest Las Vegas Valley, the desert floor again looks like sand that could easily pass through an hourglass.

In his hard hat, shades, jeans and leather work boots, Tuitama appears to be a man more at home building a stage rather than performing on one.

“It was just unbelievable when I saw Fo’i dance,” said Dale Oswald, a construction superintendent for Stewart & Sundell Concrete, Tuitama’s employer. “Who’d ever think that a guy you see working at a construction site would be entertaining people by dancing with knives that are on fire?”

On Saturday, when the Imperial Palace began its 16th Hawaiian Luau season, the 42-year-old Tuitama was again scheduled as the featured performer in its Polynesian revue.

Three nights a week from May through September, often after 12 hours of construction work, the native of Samoa performs the show-stopping fire-knife dance, a spectacle based on a fierce Samoan traditional dance known as “ailao.”

Involving the twirling of the “nifo oti,” or war knife, the original dance was a prewar ritual in Samoa used to psyche up warriors in the South Pacific islands.

The fire-knife dance features intricate rotating and spinning moves, which grow ever faster as the accompanying Polynesian drumming reaches a crescendo. If it looks dangerous, it is. Tuitama has ripped open an arm and burned his mouth, face, hands, neck and soles of his feet.

It has also resulted, Tuitama said, in him “feeling an enormous pride.”

“I can’t really describe how good it makes me feel to be able to share my heritage,” Tuitama said last week as he soaked 3-foot-long knives in gasoline before a dance rehearsal. “The fire-knife dance is the heart of manhood in entertainment in Samoan culture. Many dream of doing it, but few ever are able. I have been blessed.”

As Tuitama began the early evening rehearsal in the Imperial Palace pool area, the wind pushed the flames from the knife wildly toward his throat area. His grunts and yells during the dance prompted similar sounds from hotel guests watching from their hotel balconies.

“Go, go!” the spectators yelled as Tuitama stamped his feet on the stage and brought the flame to his mouth to swallow.

Tuitama, whose smile only seems to leave his face when dust at a construction site forces a cough, has long enjoyed the surprise expressed by fellow construction workers when they see what he does outside his day job.

“I think many people have many dimensions,” said Tuitama, whose dance attire consists largely of two yards of cotton, called a “lavalava,” wrapped around his midriff.

At one point in his act, Tuitama is on his back and his bare feet hold a knife that, to the naked eye, seems to be fully ablaze.

“I guess one of the dimensions of my life may seem a bit unusual to some people.”

Questions from construction workers, he said, are no different than those he hears from audience members.

“People want to know if the knives are sharp and if the fire is real,” he said.

Once they come forward after a performance and see and feel firsthand that the hot knives can easily draw blood and blister hands, any doubts about what they’ve seen are quickly dispelled, Tuitama said.

“There was a girl from Indiana who said she was a baton twirler and that she could easily do it,” Tuitama said. “I let her try it for a second, but she quickly saw that she would burn herself up if she continued.”

Growing up in a family of seven children,” Tuitama saw the fire dance for the first time at the age of 8.

He wanted to learn it, and become an entertainer, but he couldn’t find a teacher. His dad, a chief on the island, encouraged him to follow in his footsteps.

It wasn’t to be.

A visit to Hawaii’s Polynesian Culture Center at the age of 21, he said, changed his life. He found a teacher for the dance he had been dreaming about for years.

After five years of study, he began to solo for a dance that only about 100 men are accomplished enough to perform professionally.

In Hawaii, Tuitama also met his future wife, a Las Vegas native who, like him, was attending the Oahu campus of Brigham Young University-Hawaii. The couple have six children, ranging in age from 7 to 20.

In 1990 Fo’i Tuitama started construction work in Las Vegas.

“We just decided that we could more easily afford to live in Las Vegas than Hawaii,” said Shauna Tuitama.

As it turned out, his arrival couldn’t have been better timed. Ed Crispell, then the general manager of the Imperial Palace and now also its vice president, had returned to Las Vegas after a trip to Hawaii.

“From my hotel room, I could hear the pounding of these drums and went to check it out,” he said last week. “What I saw was a luau with a knife-fire dance. I decided that would be great for the Imperial Palace.”

Guests enjoy the buffet and other Polynesian dances, he said, but the highlight of the evening is always Tuitama’s performance.

“He’s a daredevil,” Crispell said.

Crispell said the Imperial Palace has fire extinguishers near the stage should there be a mishap. Nobody in the audience has ever been hurt, but Tuitama, a devout Mormon, still prays for safety before every performance, both for himself and the crowd.

Though he says most fire-knife dancers retire at the age of 40, Tuitama seems sure he has another 10 years left, even if he continues construction work and dancing in other Polynesian numbers at the Imperial Palace. He said he will always work several jobs so his wife can devote her time at home to their children.

“I make sure I stay in shape by working out three or four times a week with weights, and I also run,” said Tuitama, who carries a well-muscled 175 pounds on his 5-foot-8- inch frame. “You have to be in tremendous shape for this dance because it is essentially a sprint for 10 minutes. The drums get faster and faster as you come to the finale, and you just can’t slow down.”

Tuitama takes his injuries, burns that sometimes reach the third-degree, in stride.

“Some of the most difficult burns involve my tongue. When I burn it, I often can’t taste food for weeks.”

Aloe vera plants grown in the yard produce gel that his wife rubs on burned parts of his body. That gel, Tuitama said, has kept his scars to a minimum.

“I actually worry more about him on construction,” Shauna Tuitama said. “He’s hurt his back several times, and one time a piece of wood went all the way through his arm.”