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

tutorialplaneshifting.mp4

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 :)

techblog118.mp4

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.

techblog115.mp4

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.

techblog113.mp4

Sorry about the audio! Earlier this week, Alien Jon posted a video on a concept he was calling pulseweaves--an intersection between linear extensions and 3-beat weaves. Based upon his idea, I've been playing with a fountain that utilizes the grid we're familiar with playing with from elliptical CAPs. It has a funky side-effect in that moving around it antispin results in extensions in the middle, but moving around it inspin results in antispin petals in the middle.

techblog104.mp4

Okay, I'm really torn on this one having seen the video now. The flower described to me as antispin in the comments section of the last video had an upbeat between two petals and downbeat between two other petals. What I'm performing here is the first geometry I could find that conformed to the shape, but watching it now I think it's just a 2-beat corkscrew performed as a floor-plane flower. The "spiral" based flowers I played with before all had the motion of the poi head oriented at all times on a plane perpendicular to the orientation of the hand.

techblog103.mp4

Having played a little bit more with the concept of toroidal flowers I looked at in #100, I'm beginning to believe that they may lack a distinction between antispin and inspin variants. Specifically, it seems that no matter how I orient the rotation of the poi head to my hand as I turn with them, it results in the same number of downbeats and thus I'm pretty sure the same distance traveled by the poi head.

techblog102.mp4

Hooray! Lucky number 100! There have been some awesome tricks and some awful ones...some weeks when I had no idea what to post and some when I physically couldn't record enough video for all the ideas I had. Through it all I really have appreciated all the support and encouragement from the larger community out there. Thanks so much for tuning in, challenging me, learning, and teaching me!

techblog100.mp4

I've been playing some more with the same time same direction patterns Yuta was showing off at Firedrums and trying to apply the concept to stacking patterns. While technically none of these are true stacks, they share some similarities in concept in how the hands change orientation in relation to each other. Going a bit down the rabbit-hole, here is a pattern that essentially amounts to performing a stack in all four directions and alternating between an antispin and extension transition to do it.

techblog93.mp4

I had a lot of footage from Firedrums that I couldn't get into the video I made last week, so I'm going to post a couple of the things that wound up on the editing room floor this week. Here is Alien Jon teaching a crowd of eager onlookers (including myself) how to create 6-petal antispin flowers out of pieces we're familiar with from box and diamond mode antispin flowers.

alienjon6petal.mp4