Intense music in my head this morning. From Wikipedia:
Danza ritual del fuego (Ritual Fire Dance) is a movement of the ballet El amor brujo (The Bewitched Love), written by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla in 1915. It was made popular by the composer’s own piano arrangement. The dance has a duration of about three to four and a half minutes.
The work was influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee due to its fast, repetitive trills and ornaments. The piece was also influenced by the traditional, religious ceremony of a fire dance. This is a dance which was used to worship the fire-god, and in which people would often jump through or leap around the fire.
You can find photos of various native peoples engaged in fire dances — as on this cover of a recording:
Artur Rubenstein was fond of using the Ritual Fire Dance as an encore piece, performed in an extravagantly showy manner. A video:
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