EGBERT SAYERS

By Tom Sparough

 

When Egbert Sayers demonstrated his fire-eating and fire­rolling during the Public Show at this year's convention, many people wondered why he didn't get burned.

He held torches on his lips and skins for as long as two seconds. The secret to keeping cool, he says, is concentration!

 

Sayers, a 36-year-old native of the island of Barbados in the West Indies , has been presenting acts involving fire, limbo, magic, balancing, beds of nails, glass, kung fu, dance, comedy and, of course, juggling, for 21 years now. This versatile entertainer, a well-known personality in his home country, made many new fans during his first IJA

performance at Purchase last summer.

 

"I would say 75 percent of my acts are concentration," said Sayers. Besides being  vital to fire eating, it allows him to dance on glass.

 

In his two dozen weekly acts at some of the Caribbean's 300 tourist hotels, he shatters glasses and bottles collected from the audience, then walks, dances, jumps and stands on his head amongst the shards to musical accompaniment. "I look for the heaviest guy in the hotel and let him stand on my chest while I lay on my back in the glass. It's pretty fascinating," Sayers said.

 

One of his flashy tricks is to finish a pirouette with a chest dive into the glass. Once, just before the dive, he says his mind wasn't on the trick, but on the musicians who weren't playing the right tune. There was no drum roll or cymbal crash, which Sayers had come to expect.

 

Standing up after the dive, he noticed a chunk of glass stuck in his chest. He pulled it out to expose white flesh beneath.

 

He says he never would have been cut if he had kept his mind on the trick. But, concentration then allowed him to keep the wound from bleeding until he finished his act 3 1/2 minutes  later.

 

A Kung Fu teacher as well, Sayers said he employs Kung Fu techniques in juggling and other performance skills.  He uses the mental technique of picturing an action before attempting it. It's the same process Kung Fu artists use to break boards, Sayers explained. "You look at the board and concentrate on it until you see the board broken; you see your hand hitting the board and the board is cracked in two," he said.

 

He started using his powers of concentration when learning to juggle four rings. A doubting friend bet him $50 he couldn't learn to do the trick. Sayers seized the challenge. "I said, 'OK, I'm going to pro­ve to you I have ability,''' Sayers recalled, and vowed to juggle not four, but five rings, within a month. Within two weeks he was getting runs of 150 throws cascading five rings.

 

But just as the mind has to be conditioned to concentrate on the trick, the body has to be conditioned to perform the trick. Before breaking boards, the fist must be toughened. To prepare to juggle five rings, you have to condition yourself by practicing tricks such as three in one hand, he said.

 

He also thinks in opposites as he performs some of his dangerous tricks. Rather than eating fire, he tells himself it's only ice. Rather than dancing on sharp glass, he tells himself it's only soft grass.

 

The smiling man with the gold-capped teeth also does tricks such as balancing a dagger on his tongue,. a sword on top of the dagger and a waiter's tray with four burning containers on the handle of the sword. He performs some magic trick, juggles torches, walks a tight rope, spins plates and does limbo at eight inches. "With some of the limbo movements, you've got to see them to believe them," he said. "No one can explain it."

 

Perhaps Sayers' most impressive act is his fire blowing routine. One night he had a slight mix-up with his fuels which led to "the most spectacular thing I've ever seen, and dangerous, too."

 

It was on a night when he was racing from hotel to hotel doing shows. He always uses kerosene as the fuel he blows out of his mouth into a spinning flaming wheel, but that night he accidently filled the bottle with lighter fluid.

 

When he got the lighter fluid in his mouth, he noticed a different taste, but wasn't certain of the mistake. Everything else was going fine. There were about 400 people watching as he reached his climactic 25-foot fire blow. In an instant, Sayers realized that the drops of liquid which fell to the floor were still burning. That doesn't happen with kerosene, and in the same instant his lips burst into flame.

 

He quickly blew the remainder of the lighter fluid onto the floor in one big puff. It created a sea of fire and a tremendous ovation from the crowd. He smothered the fire on his mouth with the flap of his African rap.

 

Just to finish in style, he did a diving side roll on his way to the dressing room. The manager backstage said, "Egbert, that's the best fire act I've ever seen you do in my entire life!"

 

"I said to him, 'You could be right, but when you see my face you'll know you'll never see it again.' And then I turned around to face him. I was burned from nose to chin," Sayers remembers.

 

Thanks to sea water, it only took a couple of weeks for the wounds to heal, and he was performing again.

 

Sayers says he was the only person on his high school cricket team who couldn't juggle three stones on the practice field, and he did not pick it up for several years thereafter. However, through concentrated practice, he has now developed his skill to the point of six balls and rings, four clubs and four balls in the right hand, as well as - of course - torch juggling.

 

Sayers joined the IJA in 1971 after meeting Jay Green in New York. He juggled informally with some people he met then, but was not able to return to the United States until this past summer.

 

Sayers now plans to open a juggling school in Barbados using the gym where he teaches Kung Fu. His son and daughter (Don, 9, and Sophia, 15) are students, and make occasional guest appearances in the act. He plans to bring them with him to next year's IJA convention in Las Vegas.

 

He welcomes fellow jugglers to his land, which he describes as "a tourist's paradise." Solo street acts are not common on Barbados, but Sayers says he doesn't think it's illegal to pass the hat.