How-to

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #236: Under curves and over curves

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #235: More third-order antibrids

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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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Flowers part 4

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #234: Third-order antibrids (antispin/antispin)

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #233: Toroid H stalls

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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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Flowers part 3

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #232: Pentagram vs plane-bent pentagram atomic hybrid

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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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #231: Triquetra vs pendulum stall hybrid family

I didn't realize until I saw Noel's video on the stall combo out of triquetra vs pendulum last week that this move was actually one of those transition spots for a hybrid family and it opened up a whole bunch of moves all at once. Here are two hybrids, a stack, an antispin flower, and Noel's cool stalling move that all overlap on that position. The more of these hybrid families get isolated, we can treat them almost like a circle of fifths to move between different hybrid groups.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #230: Triquetra vs pendulum stall combos

This is a move I cribbed from a recent Timmehtek that was one of those very eloquent movements that instantly made me go "why didn't I think of that?" Here are a few transitions out of it that I'm digging on. Noel published a video of his own a couple days ago that plays with some very similar moments--each of these transitions would work for any of those moves as well.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #229: Negative space body tracers

In an attempt to take some elements of snaking into a vertical place, I stumbled into a pattern that seemed to make use of both negative space framing as well as creating some lovely moments of isolation. I had a hard time figuring out how to do it on the opposite side of my body (hence re-recording this tech blog), but the results make for a very satisfying fusion of body tracer, negative space, and fountain.

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