Poiboi and Santiago both have new tech vids out and both feature a wide variety of body contact rolls, so I thought I would demo here two that I've been playing with frequently myself. Both are shoulder rolls that return the poi to native hand and both really utilize horizontal momentum rather than vertical momentum unlike most of the other contact rolls I've demoed here before.

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I started playing with this trick earlier in the week...it incorporates elements of the quarter-time floats/stalls that Poiboi and Mel have been using, but drops in and out of a horizontal cateye vs isolation antibrid at each end. I've been sticking pendulum vs CAPs in the same spot and figured I would just skip the middle figure. I like that it has an interesting start-stop dynamic to it.

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I ran across a cool performance video of Yuta in the Flowspace last week that reminded me of something I'd begun playing with months ago but hadn't pursued very far: moves that involve wrapping one or both poi around their own hand. I spent a good portion of the weekend playing around with these moves in same time same direction and split time same direction, pulling out some moves I've seen both Ronan and Yuta do in their performances as well as and idea of my own.

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Last week I uploaded a tutorial on horizontal cateyes performed in split opposites and got some feedback that the cateyes were looking a little too much like floats, so I've spent a big part of the past week working on cleaning them up both by doing some older tricks I'm a big fan of and trying some newer ones. I used horizontal cateye vs isolation hybrids to check my hand spacing, horizontal cateye vs extension to check my hands' timing and direction, and a pair of triquetras arranged in a Star of David configuration to get a rough idea of what they should look like.

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I got a request on my recent video on the horizontal cateye vs CAP hybrid to describe how I was doing a pair of horizontal cateyes that I was using to switch side to side on the aforementioned hybrid. Here they are demoed--essentially they're a pair of cateyes performed in split time opposites and can easily be thought of as being a pair of floats in which then hands and poi heads switch orientation as they go back and forth. It's a little tricky because the planes the cateyes operate in are at a slight angle to each other.

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Another trick from Poiboi's latest performance video...this one is by far my favorite. It's a forearm roll where one switches from the inside of the forearm to the outside of the forearm, essentially doubling the area the poi head rolls across. It incorporates elements of what feels to me like a fishtail as well as two forearm rolls I've demoed on here before.

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Two more fundamental components of horizontal stacking explored here: the cateye and the point isolation. Neither of these moves is very stable and both require a little big of fudging to line up perfectly with the other poi, but there's still some cool applications for using them both--especially in the last pattern outlined here. Sorry about the uninspired music choice, though...it's nearly 1:30 AM and I just don't feel like digging through my music collection for something else :-P

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This will probably wrap up the new tech from the Wesleyan event--this is a move Charlie dropped on Saturday that I thought looked really cool. This is a CAP vs cateye hybrid performed in such a way that each hand performs a single beat simultaneously, such that it takes two cateyes to equal one CAP. Charlie's version is more of a linear extension, which fits well into things like an 8-step CAP or Zan's diamond. Here it is demoed as more of a cateye, which fits well with a split-opposites antispin flower and a nifty transition using split opposites cateyes across the middle.

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Another fun trick that came out of the retreat in Connecticut, Charlie on that Saturday night pulled out a fun box-mode move that utilized inspin and antispin stalls to define the corners of the box. I added a V vs. V transition to switch which corner the action was focused on and Charlie suggested using it as a setup for making a horizontal switch. We use this combo to create at 3D composite where we switch positions in the Wesleyan video.

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I spent the weekend hanging out with some of my very favorite spinners at Wesleyan University's Winter Fire Arts Festival. While there, Insignia suggested to me that I try horizontal stacks in atomic planes and a funky boxing pattern emerged. I realize before long that depending on the type of stack I was doing, that I could then plane shift out of it and resolve to a more familiar move. Thanks for the suggestion, Christian!

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