There have to be a million tutorials on how to do this move, but this past weekend in Atlanta I had a breakthrough teaching a student that I wanted to share with you all. I really hate teaching the 3-beat weave because I think that for a "beginner" move it's quite complex and really requires a large amount of physical coordination. Nevertheless, here are two approaches to learning it that I've found to be effective. Incidentally, I'm sorry about the poor focus--I didn't realize there was an issue till I'd gotten the footage home to edit :-P

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Here's a move that came out of a skill exchange I had over the weekend with Charles Hinton in Atlanta. He showed me a nifty pendulum-based move that was designed to teach BTB air wraps. I didn't have a lot of luck with the pattern as he'd laid it out, but I decided to work out a different approach to air wraps behind the back and have had some limited successes.

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I'm wrapping up the poi flower series with this vid on antispin. Antispin could really be its own video series entirely, so I'm just giving a couple different approaches to creating antispin petals in this video and letting people take the exercises used in the previous videos in this series to extrapolate the different timing and direction combinations. If you'd like to see a full series on antispin, please let me know!

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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.

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A follow-up to last weeks video on the triangle third-order antibrid. I started modeling the shapes that are generated by putting various third-order motions over antispin flowers and came up with some intriguing results. Here are third-order antibrids for cateye, triquetra, 4-petal antispin, and an inspin version of the triquetra one.

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This week we're following on the heels of last week's lesson on split-time same direction flowers with some split-time opposite flowers. The good news is that if you got the split-time same direction flower down, this one is considerably easier.

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This is something I saw Alien Jon demo when I was home in Colorado for the holidays--it combines third order motions (fractal flowers) with traditional flowers to create antibrids that move through space. Damien would call these antispin/antispin movements and I believe Mel, Poiboi, and a few others have demonstrated similar moves.

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A follow-up from the toroid H concept from a couple weeks ago. This takes the same concept, but makes the toroid a ball instead of planet mode toroid and creates a cool stalling pattern out of it. Short but sweet--it's cold out there!

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This week we're tackling the Mt. Everest of inspin flowers: split time same direction. We'll use a similar approach to building this flower that we have in the other videos, but split-time variants require a bit more kinesthetic difficulty than any of the same time variations, so the road there is likely to be a little bit longer and take a bit more work. Next week: split-time opposites!

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This is a challenge that comes courtesy Dave "Honeybear" Foregger. While I was in Boston, he showed me a pentagram vs pentagram hybrid he'd been working on and it set my gears turning. It's a similar challenge to triangle vs triquetra, but the trochoid pentagram must travel much faster to stay in phase with the plane-bent variant, so synchronizing their movements can be a pain. This is also a great use of crane position done in different orientations.

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