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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Partner Poi Weave

The partner poi weave is not only easy to learn, you can teach it to a complete poi neophyte in under 10 minutes! Here's a little bit of guerilla street theatre: I found Jerod here in Lafayette Park and used him as a guinea pig to both teach the partner weave as well as demonstrate how easy it is to pick up and learn. Thanks so much to Jerod for being a good sport! :D

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #272: Making a routine!

I have a performance coming up with Contradiction Dance for which I had to come up with a solo poi piece. Here's a couple sections of the piece that I've been working on in the past couple weeks. I'm sharing them because I'm hoping that the choices I made in putting these elements together will help some of you out there working on your own pieces.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #271: 3 hand-switching throws

A grab-bag of hand-switching throws I've either been working on or have encountered in the past couple months. The first is a triquetra vs pendulum hand switch Noel came up with during the same spin jam where I started working on the triquetra vs pendulum throw from the last tech blog. The second is a hand-switch that comes out of a snake that I've had a hell of a time getting clean these past few months. The third is a hand-switch I spotted Matt Cullen using a lot during a spin session he did at PEX Summer Festival.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Throws part 2

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.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #270: No-beat throws in triquetra vs pendulum

Here's a fun move that came out of a spin jam with Noel over the weekend at PEX Summer Festival: taking a no-beat throw and apply it to an antispin placement such that the top petal of triquetra vs pendulum winds up being a toss. This can be done either in front of the body or behind. I'm playing with my format a little bit a presenting the move both by narrating through it and showing it normal time and slowed down--let me know what you think of this format.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #269: Fishtail weaves

Another fishtail-based move from Kate's video a few months ago. This one incorporates a fishtail with a tic-tac on the other hand to create a weave with one hand performing the afore-mentioned contact move. Watch out--this one is even harder than learning the original fishtail was!

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Throws part 1

Part 1 of a 2 part series on how to do some of the most basic throws/releases with poi. This particular one is on throws where the poi continues to rotate after the release, including isolated throws and what I'd call "flower" throws. Next week we'll cover basic float throws and the like.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #268: Toroid hexagrams

I've demonstrated the unicursal hexagram on this blog before, but it's only been recently that I've been able to perform a more regular hexagram--the type that looks like a Star of David with a pair of overlapping triangles. Here are two approaches to making it. One has one point up and one down and the other has the points out to the side.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #267: Negative space and contact from horizontal body tracers

This was an interesting discovery based upon messing up a trick I was trying to do: there's a great way to take horizontal body tracers and use them as an entry point for negative space combos and contact rolls.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Contact forearm rolls

Contact rolls are one of my favorite moves. Here is a breakdown of how to do them on both the inner and outer forearm. They take a little bit of work, but they're a great tool to have in your box :)

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