An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here is Sean from Flowtoys spinning his double staves, doing some really cool 3D patterns I've never seen before. Enjoy!

seanburningman.mp4

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.

techblog48.mp4

Starting off with a couple tricks I'd consider to be a little bit older school style tech than I usually work with--the first is inspired by rope dart tricks that shoot the head off in the opposite direction it's been wrapped in. Next is a trick that uses releases to transition from meltdown to behind-the-back waistwraps and back. This is sketchy! Next, in order to get down the spherical CAPs I've been working on the past few weeks, I've been doing drills to get my hands used to doing quarter-beat stalls in same-time opposites.

techblog46.mp4

A highly fortuitous meeting with Alien Jon in Barcelona led to the first trick here, combining plane-bending with a concept I was unfamiliar with called diagonal planes. Currently I can only plane bend with it or turn, but I suspect other tricks will begin to emerge using these techniques. Second, at Wildfire Noel showed me a double-staff trick wherein one alternates one hand doing antispin and the other hand sliding straight across the body along its own axis which creates an 8-step move that one can easily break out of into any number of other patterns.

techblog42.mp4

Bliss, Brandon (NC), Julia and Kathryn from Barefoot Monkeys, Ricky from A Different Spin, and a bunch of other folks I don't know spin doubles together on the last night of Wildfire. Regrettably, the camera went unrecoverably blurry toward the end, but there's a lot of cool stuff before it gets there.

blissbrandonwildfire.mp4