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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #291: Inversions and crosspoints

After learning how to do inversions in Tog-Opposites, I noticed something peculiar about the arrangement of the cross points in all the opposite direction inversions I'd played with--they always appeared to be pointing away from each other while the inversions I'd worked with in split-time same direction tended always to have the crosspoint in the same direction. Question is: is it diagnostic of how inversions work or a cool byproduct of them?

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Corkscrews

Corkscrews are usually the first floor plane move that many poi spinners learn. It's fundamentally a chase move with the hands moving up and down the body while the poi rotate in a horizontal plane. Here are a few tricks on how to get down this trick.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #290: Timing and direction in pentagrams

Kind of random, I know, but I've spent the past few months working out all the different same direction phasings for antispin pentagrams. The end goal here is to get them down in toroids, but I figured starting here might be the low hanging fruit :) The funny thing is that all these phasings are really reflections of each other. If you think of each point skipped has having a number value to it, then 1 and 4 are identical save for the hand that is leading through the pattern. Likewise, 2 and 3 are the same except that the positions of the hands are reversed in each increment.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #289: Split-opposites inversions

I was showed these at Wildfire this past year as I was wrestling with trying to learn inversions in opposites (my problem was I was trying to do them in opposites same time), but now they're presentable! Here they are as a 4-beat split-time thread the needle and as an element of Zan's diamond in split-opposites.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #288: Staggered stalls

This was totally one of those "duh" moments where I spotted other folks doing a particular trick and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get my hands to do it. But going the long way round actually turned out to be the better option because it helped me conceptualize how one could approach--here's how you can stagger stalls in a split-time place to produce a variety of nifty moves, including some that strongly resemble stall chasers and horizontal stacks.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Behind the Back part 3

In the final installment of this behind the back series, we'll tackle the meltdown! Meltdowns are a move in which one rapidly wraps the poi around their back, unwraps them, and then rewraps them going the other direction to create a rapid and exciting move. Here's how to build them up piece by piece.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #286: Leo's vertical stack

At the Tahoe Flow Festival, Leo showed me this nifty vertical stack that I quickly realized could be used to stack up and down each side of the body. It requires some deft timing, but has a really unique effect.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #285: Toroids--the East Coast Method

A few months back, Alex Powell from the Vulcan published an interesting treatise on his approach to toroids. There's been a second school of thought that's come out of meetings at Wildfire and other East Coast fire events and this is my best attempt to consolidate a lot of the thinking on this type of spinning and make it ready for the masses.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #284: Arashi's atomics

At Burning Man this year, Arashi took me through his approach to spinning in atomics. It took a couple hours, but ultimately I came to understand it was a system with significant differences to other 3D systems I was familiar with--most notably with Maiki Nope's 3D timing and direction system. Here's a brief encapsulation of the idea.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #283: Toroid hybrids

A few weeks ago, Alex Powell uploaded a great video of some interesting hybrids utilizing toroids in an atomic configuration. I started working on these same hybrids in other timing and direction combinations as well as some pendulum-based toroid hybrids after taking a pendulums class from Ronan in Tahoe. Here are the results.

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