Micah Naruo is a soft-spoken, polite young man, but if you’re going to mess with him, watch out: You’re playing with fire.

The Honolulu native is one of two Samoan fire-dance performers for "Alegria," the combination circus-musical performance-art spectacular that Cirque du Soleil is presenting at the Blaisdell Arena. It begins a two-week run tonight.

Naruo, a former fire dancer at the Polynesian Cultural Center, is quite aware of the dangers of his profession. He and his stage partner, Maui Sumeo, whom he has known since they performed together at PCC in the early 2000s, perform stunts such as spinning and throwing flaming knives at a staccato pace.

"I feel lucky that I’ve never hurt anybody in the audience," said Naruo. "In some places, we’re no more than maybe 15 feet away from the crowd. … Myself? Yes, I’ve been injured."

Naruo, 26, starting learning fire dancing at age 13 after his family noticed he "had a fascination with fire. Growing up here in Hawaii, we always saw it at luaus. I just wanted to spin it."

He studied with Gloria Snyder of the Hui ‘o Kamalei hula halau and showed immediate promise.

"He progressed faster than anyone," Snyder recalled. "He would go the park and practice and practice and practice."

Snyder said a good fire dancer will display speed, precision and great timing in a routine, which should include range and variety of movement. "And, of course, you can’t drop that knife," she said.

Soon Naruo was participating in PCC’s fire-dancing competition, placing third in the youth division in only his second year. He was offered the chance to join Cirque du Soleil while still in high school, but chose to attend California Lutheran College in Thousand Oaks, studying sports medicine.

After graduation, he often performed with Snyder’s halau and reached the semifinals of the men’s division of the PCC competition. He reapplied with Cirque du Soleil.

"I had to wait because there’s only two fire-knife positions here and two in Las Vegas in ‘O’ (another Cirque show)," he said. He joined the "Alegria" tour in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, but the show has been mostly touring North American cities since then.

Naruo is one of only three Americans in the 55-member touring company, which includes performers from 16 other nations.

More than anything it is the travel schedule — 10 weeks on, two weeks off; lengthy bus trips at the end of a run; arriving in the wee hours of the night — that has taken getting used to.

"I have to get rest and find ways to escape but at the same time keep my focus on the show. It’s a balance."

The fire dance originated as a warrior dance in Samoa. Warriors danced with sawtoothed knives, called nifo otu or "tooth of death," said Naruo, who wears a replica of the weapon as a pendant.

The nifo otu was combined with a hooked weapon on a staff that warriors used "to carry the heads of their enemies around after a battle," he said. Fire was added in the 1940s by Freddie Letuli, a performer who later would become a Samoan chief.

Fire dancing might hold a special place in Cirque productions because its founder, Guy Laliberte, was originally a fire dancer. Though for safety reasons Naruo and Sumeo are allowed to practice only 15 minutes a week with actual fire, they are given a degree of artistic freedom not afforded the other Cirque acts, Naruo said.

"There are musical cues that we have to finish on, but in between we create what we want and we present it to the artistic director," he said. "If he thinks something might be better, then we can switch things around. … We are our own coach.

"The hardest part of this job, aside from makeup, is the mental stress to always pull yourself together for those five minutes and to be completely aware of everything around you."

Correction: The Samoan sawtoothed knife is called a nifo otu. An earlier version of this story mispelled the word.