Yell “Judo chop!” at them, it should trigger a persons fight or flight response. Option A they turn ready for combat and hopefully ready to avoid a flaming object. Option B they cower and probably fair rather well.

OR

how about "shoe's untied"... you would stop and look down, maybe even hunch over. I think this would only work if the "shouter" did this just before the flaming object was to strike our victim. If you say it as the object begins its flight o doom the person may have time to look and realize; No, my shoe is not untied… you lied to me, then they would turn to you and get hit in the face as they begin to retort to your egregious fabrication of reality.

I just laugh...a lot.

Jaine:

As you're aware, Lena and I do a lot of work with partner tosses. There are still times where we will be in the heart of a performance and come to a point where we're ready to toss and one, or the other, will kibosh that part of the performance for any of a variety of reasons. The downside is that we don't always get to do it, the upside is that we've never missed a shot during a show.

When I worked in tree removal (trees that were about to fall on houses, etc, so we'd climb up and take them apart from the top), headache was we'd say when something was in an uncontrolled fall as well, funny that it got used in steel too.

For routines that have partner tosses you might want to _always_ say something when flinging your firey bits skyward. "Good!" or "Shit!" or "Bad!" or "Oh what a lovely trajectory that is indeed!"

If you are both in the habit of always saying _something,_ you won't freeze up or go mute when you really should be saying "ohmygodI'msofuckingsorry!" or the equivalent.