Accidentally hurling your flaming sword into an unwitting audience can take a little luster off your fire-performance street cred. After witnessing that amateur accident by another troupe, Xavier Frost of Pure Cirkus decided to cowrite a 40-page safety manual for fire performers detailing distance regulations (four feet for fire-eating tools; 15 feet for balls of fire swung by chains, aka "poi"), the importance of rigorous training, and why you must always, always check your fire tools before going onstage.

Frost is currently the CEO of the nonprofit company and queer-arts advocate the 4 Horsemen, and has helped bring together the marginalized communities of burlesque, drag, modern circus, acrobatics, and suspension—the forms that fit together in the sense that they don't really fit anywhere else. Frost's cabaret Hellfire Variety Show will feature a cavalcade of menacing stilt walkers, devilish burlesquers, and a ravaged throng of sultry aerialists, acro-balancers, and vaudevillians in various stages of descent into the inferno. Director/MC Armitage Shanks navigates the underworld with postapocalyptic peelers Inga Ingénue and Evilyn Sin Claire, aerialist/fire spinner Jenny Penny, plus members of Circus Contraption. (And for the record: Fire eating, apparently, is legal; fire breathing is not.)

Hellfire, Wed–Thurs Feb 24–25, Triple Door.