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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #252: Zan's diamond in monorhythm hybrids and CAPs

The follow-up to my vid on Zan's diamond in all the different timing and direction combinations and polyrhythm hybrids. Here I demo all the monorhythm/even beat hybrids for Zan's diamond and discuss third-order CAPs, including the S-CAP and how it can work inside the Zan's diamond algorithm.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #251: Body tracers and even beat hybrids

Do all even beat hybrids have an accompanying body tracer? That's the question I posed after playing around with some of the body tracers Ted Petrosky taught in his workshop on the same topic at FLAME Festival. After tweaking one of the tracers he'd taught just slightly, I realized it was very similar to a body tracer I'd learned from Thomas "Nevisoul" Johansson. The original tracer he'd taught me turned out to also function as a 4-petal antispin vs 2-petal inspin hybrid.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Tangles part 1 - air wraps

A tutorial on the most basic tangle--the air wrap is a tangle in wall plane that immediately untangles itself after two beats. Here are a number of tricks for breaking it down if, like me, the trick was very counter-intuitive to you. Next week we will cover applying some of these lessons to learning hyper loops.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #250: snaking 1.5s

This was one of the last pieces of tech I learned at FLAME and came out of a skill share that happened back at Kinetic Hive after we got back from the festival. It was born out of the idea of combining 1.5s with body tracers and we realized our basic pattern had a lot in common with a 1.5 CAP that Mireneye came up with years ago. Here also are two variants that Ky and myself came up with.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #249: Fishtail antibrids

Featuring Kate McCoy! Kate taught an awesome class on fishtails at FLAME Festival near Atlanta, GA and we had some really cool breakthroughs in the course of it. One of which was a combo that utilized triquetra vs pendulum wherein the pendulum is performed with a fishtail pendulum. This made me think of a pendulum vs CAP, which sets you up for an interesting passing move wherein you switch which hand is holding which part of the poi.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Cateyes

The first of a few weeks' worth of tutorials requested by you, my viewers! This first one is on cateyes, which I don't normally think of as a beginner trick, but the standards of such things have definitely changed since I started spinning. Here is the simplest way I know to break down a vertical cateye for all you folks out there who are working on this trick.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #248: Zan's diamond in polyrhythm hybrids

Last week as I was working out Zan's diamond with toroids, Kory San made a request for a video on Zan's diamond and its accompanying hybrids. I'm splitting this into two videos: this first one covers the basic algorithms of Zan's diamond as a third-order motion and the polyrhythm hybrids that are available as a result of thinking of each section of the shape as a discrete triquetra. Next week I'll cover some variants that are even-downbeat and thus timing and direction remain consistent throughout.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #248: Kate's antibrid weave

A commenter on my video about the crosser archer weave reminded me of a move Kate had demoed last year at Kinetic and in one of Noel's videos. I dug it back up to see what it had in common with the move I'd just played with. The answer: very little, but it was still a hell of a fun challenge :)

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Down and Up Stalls

The second in my transition tools series. This week we're talking about stalls--when you stop the poi's momentum and have the ability to reverse the direction of the poi if you want. Included here is a breakdown of how stalls work. Yay charts! :D

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #247: Split (and same) time opposites Zan's diamond toroids

A challenge from Jeffrey Bird on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook--he wanted to see Zan's diamond rendered in opposites split-time in toroids. It took a little bit of doing, but I actually think it's far cleaner than the split-time same direction version I demoed a couple weeks ago. Bonus: I also decided to demo the same-time opposites version of the pattern.

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