This past week, Insignia posted a note to Facebook trying to map out all hybrids by matching up all the driving styles he knew of: isolation, extension, cateye, antispin, pendulum, and CAP and going through them one-by-one till he'd identified all the combinations possible between them. Here is a demo of all the hybrids he listed (though I just realized I forgot cateye vs. CAP--whoops). Some of these have an interesting aesthetic value to them while some are just an utter pain in the ass.

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Starting off with an update on the pattern I showed off last week. Insignia had posted a comment about plane-bending in and out of it and here is a demo of the combination he mentioned. Also, I got a request for a demo of a cateye flower a couple weeks ago and here are four extrapolations of the idea. Ultimately one can look at this concept as either a flower with multiple points of rotation or as a variant on the unit circle grid idea. Please share thoughts on this as I haven't seen it demoed before.

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A gig over the weekend afforded me the opportunity to pull out a pair of flag poi I hadn't used in forever and realized a lot of my tech worked even with the tails. The first minute and a half of this is choreo I'd developed for a different performance up in Philly this past weekend that didn't come together. After that it's all improv and a whole lot of fun :)

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Still practicing hyperloops--I feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do with this, so repetition is key. I've also added under the legs moves to my catchup game for beginner to intermediate skills. Beyond that, I keep finding more stuff I love to do with CAPs. First up is taking the flower stall switch from last week and instead switching to a CAP. In wallplane, it creates a really cool pattern that I want to play with more.

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After an awesome couple weeks hanging out with some of my favorite poi spinners on the east coast, I've gotten to learn a lot about split-time stall shifts in the style of Rastaxel. Insignia has been taking these and adding a plane-bent flourish in the middle. I showed this pattern to Baz and he came up with an over the arm stall. I added a Yuta stall shift to Baz's motion and though it looks sloppy I've been having a lot of fun with it. I think I may have prematurely christened the spherical CAP--I described it by the pattern it adds up to rather than its component pieces.

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Two weeks ago at Boom Boat, Insignia showed off some spherical CAP ideas that really sent me back to the drawing board to see what was possible. Here are some of those ideas rendered, plus some more fun stall switching patterns and head orbit play.

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The past few weeks in my video blog, I've played with the concept of taking our current understanding of elliptical CAPs and translating them into 3-D shapes. I dubbed the concept "spherical CAPs" but I'm now starting to question if it's either accurate or actually descriptive of the concept. Here's why:

At boomboat over the weekend, Christian pointed out to me that all my CAP plane-bending experiments had overlooked a very obvious possibility: performing a CAP in horizontal plane. This, it turns out, is also an awesome transition to diagonal plane CAPs. Also, A bizarre property of CAP transitions into full-arm movements. It turns out that the four basic combinations of timing and directions have three transition points with the most common CAPs, so halving a flower gives you three of the four combinations--not two. Any mathematicians can tell me why?

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Waiting for an oil change gave me a perfect chance to try out some flow! Not terribly dancey or big in footwork, but there are some cool experiments with pendulums, wraps, and LOTS of plane-changing here. Not all of it works terribly well, but there are some cool transitions in here. Also--some attempts at dropping the spherical CAP pattern into flow. Enjoy!

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I'm trying to think if there are two more different skills I could have spent the last week playing with. Among the gaps in my knowledge are airwraps and how to get out of hyperloops. This week I finally set down to learn how this type of motion works and by and large the practice has been paying off. Also I've spent a lot of time working on the spherical CAP pattern I theorized about last week, breaking it down to each incremental movement.

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