This tutorial examines body tracers from the vantage point of thinking of them as two-beat weaves that shift position along the body and starts with a couple basic exercises and the theory behind them and moves into a few examples of the technique in action.

bodytracertutorial.mp4

Months ago I did a couple tech blogs on toroid flowers, that is flowers that are created by constantly plane-bending the poi around a circular hand path. The resulting corkscrew motion then loops back in upon itself, suggestion a circular tube and hence a toroid. Charlie and Ted had suggested to me that there was an antispin variant on this flower and showed it to me at Fall Wildfire last year. It's come up again both because it means our conception of inspin toroidal flowers was off and because it turns out it's closely related to some of the Arashi-based tech I've played with of late.

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This is a months old trick I can't believe I haven't done a tech blog on yet. It came out of Alien Jon, Charlie, and I playing with body tracers when AJ and Charlie were in town back in April. The algorithm for going through this variant on the diamond is a little wonky, but I still think it looks cool. Enjoy! :)

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Here's another hybrid family based upon a particular poi orientation--this one being hands together and poi apart. Triquetra vs pendulum, Mel's horizontal stack, point isolation walking, and stall chasers all make use of this alignment. Like the other hybrid families I've demonstrated on this video blog, it's a great tool for transitions.

techblog171.mp4

Here's part two of my wrap-up from Arashi's Firedrums class. This covers how you can use the poi plane and cross points to build polygons rather than using the traditional trochoid method of defining polygon sides with an arc and corners with loops/petals. The implications of this are really cool because they allow you to build polygons that present an image in three dimensions rather than the flat shapes we normally work with.

techblog170.mp4

Here's my first tutorial breaking down some of the tech Arashi laid down in his class at Firedrums. Here we're just dealing with some basic plane-bends that create some nifty diagonal shapes and the concept of using cross points in places we don't normally stick them. You'll see more than a few ideas here that have also popped up in Alien Jon and G vids, so think of this as a basic tutorial on how to start aiming planes as much as we aim flower petals.

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Here's a popular viewer request: the 3D flowers that Mel was doing at the end of his "Red Pants" video. These flowers are based in the idea of having the poi spinning in a different plane than the hand and therefore creating a spiral or worm-shaped profile for the viewer. Tank and I played with a similar concept two years ago at Firedrums, but placed the poi plane in wall rather than horizontal plane.

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http://www.drexfactor.com

Here's a recap of one of my favorite classes from Firedrums: Keith Marshall's class on negative space. These are two of the tricks we covered that are both cyclical so they're repeatable. The first is relatively simple using a non-native frame and the second can be performed with a contact roll creating a native side frame.

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Beginning the process of downloading all the tech from the past three weeks. This is a trick that Asaf (Poiboi) came up with that we used for a lot of our tunneling both at Kinetic and at Firedrums. The idea is to take horizontal cateye vs isolation and utilize some horizontal stacking to switch to the same move on the other side of the body. The spacing works due to that quirk of antispin flowers wherein they put the poi a unit circle distance apart 1/6th of the way around the handpath.

techblog166.mp4

This is an expansion of an idea from a previous video: when you take 3 downbeat flowers and perform them at a 2-poi length handpath, 1/6 of the way around the handpath there is a point where the distance between the intercept for the hand and its reflection across the horizontal axis of the pattern is one poi length. If we vary the combinations and phasing of 3 downbeat patterns, we wind up creating the alignments of all the major unit circle hybrids. Here are 4 examples of how this cool quirk of geometry can be used. Major thanks to Charlie for the help in figuring this one out.

techblog164.mp4