CAPs are a great transitional move that can be used to spice up hybrids or even just on their own. They used to be considered pretty technical, but I've seen a lot of people nail them within their first year of spinning. This is the method I've seen most often succeed for teaching beginner or intermediate spinners how to do them and it's inspired by a method for teaching triquetras I saw in an old Alien Jon video.

tutorialccaps.mp4

A continuation of the Foreways project--Noel came into town for one day and we spent 5 hours writing this piece before recording it. This was our second take of the final piece and though there are a couple bits that are out of synch overall I think the piece was a great success :)

foreways3.mp4

This week's tutorial covers throws that minimize the rotation of the poi, from float throws to plane-shifted throws, and finally no-beat throws. There's also a bit of inspiration here for how to play around with this type of movement and some of the fun things you can do with it.

tutorialthrowspt2.mp4

This is a tutorial on how to take some of the tricks we used last week in creating our forwards 3-beat weave and apply them to learning the same trick in reverse. As an added bonus, included are steps to learning how to turn between forwards and reverse 3-beat weaves. A friend of mine had pointed out that frequently the reverse 3-beat can be as difficult to learn as the forwards one because one has to switch around the arrangement of pieces in a way that seems almost upside-down.

rev3beatweave.mp4

Something a little different: I've been trying to come up with some bite-sized chunks of how my work in modern dance has been informing my poi spinning these past few months and here's a small but easy to learn bit that involves teaching your body core to move around in a circle in a way that interacts with your arms in very interesting ways.

techblog236.mp4

Last week we covered how to train your muscle memory for proper petal placement in 4-petal inspin flowers. This week we're covering how to then perform 4-petal inspin flowers with both hands in same time same direction and same time opposites. The procedure here is very similar to the one we used last week, but we will have to resort to a couple tricks to achieve proper poi and hand placement.

flowerspt2.mp4

This is the first time I've spun when I've spent as much time thinking about what my feet are doing as I did about what my poi were doing. I had a really epic flow session leading up to this and there's some laughably bad moments, but overall I feel like this is just as interesting to watch as some of my techier videos but in a very different sort of way.

footwerk12912.mp4

The experiment continues! This is a series on how to do poi flowers. This week we're starting with basic inspin flower petal placement--how to train your body to find the four compass points of a 4-petal inspin and how to create both 2-petal and 4-petal flowers. Next week we'll talk about how to use both hands to create flowers together.

flowerspt1.mp4

Posting a week late, I know...but trust me it was recorded on MLK Day. About ten minutes after I'd gotten off a bus coming home from New York, in fact. The tradition lives on if slightly delayed ;)

mlkday2012.mp4

The final installment of our first beginners series: in this one we'll take what we know about turning and tick-tacks and apply them to turns between wheel and wall plane in all the different timing and direction combinations. Once you've mastered each of these positions, you can easily flow between them as you perform.

turnspt3.mp4