A couple months ago I posted a tutorial on plane-changing that was heavily focused on vertical plane-shifts. Lately I've been playing with a couple exercises that have really been helping to nail down the stuff in floor plane and thought I'd share them. Enjoy!

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Just an experiment...editing my video instead of doing it as a single take. Please leave feedback and let me know what y'all think of doing it this way. Anys, today on the Poi Theory Group on Facebook, there was a fascinating discussion over horizontal stacking patterns and Leo (leospoi) lent us some of his expertise. He's been thinking of abbreviating the elements of these tricks with single letters to as a mnemonic device to make different combinations. With that in mind, here are three homogeneous patterns, three hybrids, and one possible CAP based upon this breakdown.

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This is a trick inspired by Tim Goddard's recent video posting to the Facebook Tech Poi Group. In it, he switches his pendulum and CAP hands using an isolation out of what would otherwise be a spot where you could insert a cateye vs isolated pendulum. In an online chat, we discussed the possibilities of working off the extension rather than antispin to go into isolated split-opposites. The spacing also sets us up to be able to do horizontal cateye vs isolation or just go into any number of isolation-based tricks.

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When I was experimenting with timing and direction changes using the quarter-time stall pattern Poiboi used in his holiday performance video, I ran across a way to elevate CAP vs pendulum but got stuck when I realized I didn't have a good way to move it back down to its normal height. After playing with it for a couple weeks, I have a couple different approaches for doing this now--one involves going into a static vs extension hybrid off of the arc of the CAP and the other involves a very tricky iso vs cateye combo off the antispin section of the CAP.

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Here's a sequence of moves that Noel and I came up with in Philly that he took some video of. It breaks down to the stall chase to throw sequence Poiboi was doing in his latest performance video, then creating a negative space frame to throw the other poi through and finally utilizing a split-time negative space trick that Noel had been working off with an airwrap to wrap the whole thing up. The two of us performed this trick simultaneously and had a bear of a time getting synchronized.

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Sorry about the audio quality! Last week Poiboi uploaded a video of a performance he did in Israel that was pretty kickass and also seemed to be a kind of an update on a performance he did earlier in the year at EJC. One of the changes he did was changing a switch from CAP vs pendulum to quarter-time stalls to CAP vs pendulum going the other way to using quarter-time floats as the transition.

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Yet another contact trick from Ted (if you get a chance, definitely take a class from this kid at Wildfire), this one involves a fun reversal on a contact trick I've been playing with for months wherein after trapping the head, one rolls it down the forearm of the arm that catches it rather than across the opposite forearm. This sets you up to be able to do fun reversals where you can flick the poi back using the cradle-to-forearm roll or theoretically roll it across the forearm of the opposite arm to generate a longer contact surface.

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In New York I had a funky breakthrough wherein I realized I could stick a horizontal cateye vs iso hybrid on either end of the horizontal stall stacking move Charlie came up with based upon Mel's pattern at Wildfire. Knowing this, I tied together a bunch of threads from the past couple months using moves that all incorporate this hybrid and thus treat it as a transition tool to get between them. Some cool things came out of playing with this.

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Continuing with the theme of some fun moves that can be done from the back-to-back triquetra move in wallplane that looks something like a split time same direction antispin flower, here is one that incorporates some elements from tricks that Mel and Poiboi have been playing around with lately: namely when the hands are at opposite ends of the flower top and bottom, you pendulum the top hand and top stall the bottom to align the poi, then reverse this same motion and treat the resulting position as a stall before reversing the direction of the wall plane triquetras.

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I've had a rather productive week playing around with tricks that are based in triquetras--here is the first one of a couple: this move is based upon the idea that performing back-to-back triquetras in wall plane can create a transition point to a triquetra vs pendulum hybrid on either side of the pattern by conserving the rotation of the two poi when they brush past each other in the middle of the figure. Takes a little bit of finessing to make it come together, but a really cool transition!

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