Sorry I've disappeared! Last week was really intense and I didn't have a chance to do a video blog. This is based upon a trick Ted from New York posted in a video a few weeks ago wherein he was switching to iso vs horizontal cateye at each of the side petals of an opposites split-time antispin flower. Continuing with the antispin flower means that the hands have to exit on the opposite side of the unit circle they enter from, so you have to exit after half a turn, or add a half turn to every complete rotation of the trick.

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Another one of those funky things that's come out of the Facebook Tech Poi Group: a type of CAP based around an S-shaped handpath. You have to slightly change how you approach the antispin section to put the poi head in the right place. Here I demonstrate a couple patterns that utilize this shape with hands going split opposites. The first one is pretty clean but the second one needs work :-P These also mesh really well with a variant of G's floating triquetra pattern.

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Christian posted a challenge on the Facebook Tech Poi group this past week asking for CAP vs cateye hybrid possibilities. Never one to back down from a challenge, I started working through it. I'll admit I haven't found anything yet that I feel is really that aesthetically pleasing, but here's what came out nonetheless.

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A lesson on plane shifting including basic components, building blocks, and a few examples. In honor of a departed member of the poi community.

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I got a lot of emails and comments last week asking me about a trick I had done during my performance at Wildfire's performance class last Sunday, specifically the one I'd done at roughly 2:30 in it. Here is an explanation of the move--it's a variant on Charlie's 8-step CAP pattern used as a transition between same time same direction hybrids and the wall plane antispin flower that's really a pair of triquetras that I tend to overuse frequently in performances. It's not earth-shattering, but I like the effect of it :)

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Remember that funky thing I played with last week that combined elements of CAPs, floats, stalls, and extensions? Well I put it into wallplane and found that just like it's wheelplane cousin, it opens up the doors to lots of transitions to wallplane CAPs, antispins, plane-shifts, and more. This pattern is reminding me more and more of Charlie's concept of totipotent patterns that can switch between timing and direction combinations.

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While I was in Africa, I started playing with a funky pattern wherein one makes like they're going to do a CAP after 3/4 of an extension circle only to use the antispin petal as a stall and pull back out of it into a float. Putting it together with both hands results in a pattern that has some CAP-like qualities but ends in each hand and poi head being pointed straight out from center, opening up some interesting possibilities for transitions.

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Uploading videos here in Africa has proven to be such a production that I think this might be the last one I get to upload before coming home, but keep an eye out just in case I change my mind ;) Here are two methods for switching which hand is performing CAP and which hand is performing pendulum in the CAP vs pendulum antibrid I've been working to death lately. The first method switches both moves to isolated pendulums and when the orientation of the hands is reversed, we return to the original move.

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After having been spending a lot of time trying to get the basic contact poi moves down, I went back and viewed a couple of Poiboi's old tech blogs and realized that a lot of the contact moves he demoed in them made a lot more sense, so I went back to learn them and found there are a couple interesting transitions using these basic contact moves that actually look pretty neat! One is demoed here: you switch from static vs. extension to pendulum vs. CAP using the forearm roll where one catches the poi on the opposite arm before flicking it to roll along the original forearm.

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I made a stop this past weekend at Nairobi National Park just outside the city to take in some wildlife and untouched African wilderness and it gave me the perfect opportunity to record a video! I know I've been doing a lot with pendulum vs CAP lately and I probably will keep on doing so because what I'm finding is so much fun! Here I've been working to put together a point isolation with a pendulum to create the illusion of the two poi moving together like a single line.

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