A lesson on plane shifting including basic components, building blocks, and a few examples. In honor of a departed member of the poi community.

tutorialplaneshifting.mp4

I got a lot of emails and comments last week asking me about a trick I had done during my performance at Wildfire's performance class last Sunday, specifically the one I'd done at roughly 2:30 in it. Here is an explanation of the move--it's a variant on Charlie's 8-step CAP pattern used as a transition between same time same direction hybrids and the wall plane antispin flower that's really a pair of triquetras that I tend to overuse frequently in performances. It's not earth-shattering, but I like the effect of it :)

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Over the weekend at Wildfire, we played around some more with Mel's top stall vs. pendulum pattern from the "Red Pants" video. Charlie found an interesting inversion of it wherein the leading hand performs a float rather than a topstall, making the internal alignment on each side a hand to poi relationship rather than hand to hand, thus allowing you to drop out of the move into static spin vs extension or a host of other moves. Even better, it's totally easy to switch between both variants.

techblog117.mp4

While I was in Africa, I started playing with a funky pattern wherein one makes like they're going to do a CAP after 3/4 of an extension circle only to use the antispin petal as a stall and pull back out of it into a float. Putting it together with both hands results in a pattern that has some CAP-like qualities but ends in each hand and poi head being pointed straight out from center, opening up some interesting possibilities for transitions.

techblog113.mp4

In his "Red Pants" video, Mel demonstrated a trick wherein he alternated hands performing pendulum and top stalls to create a cool pattern that switches between the relationship of hands to each other and poi to each other. Erik reminded me of this trick before I left for the playa and we spent a whole afternoon messing with it at Vulcantown during Burning Man. We added floats, isolated pendulums, plane shifts, and more to it. Here are all the variants I can remember.

techblog112.mp4

After having been spending a lot of time trying to get the basic contact poi moves down, I went back and viewed a couple of Poiboi's old tech blogs and realized that a lot of the contact moves he demoed in them made a lot more sense, so I went back to learn them and found there are a couple interesting transitions using these basic contact moves that actually look pretty neat! One is demoed here: you switch from static vs. extension to pendulum vs. CAP using the forearm roll where one catches the poi on the opposite arm before flicking it to roll along the original forearm.

techblog110.mp4

Hooray! Lucky number 100! There have been some awesome tricks and some awful ones...some weeks when I had no idea what to post and some when I physically couldn't record enough video for all the ideas I had. Through it all I really have appreciated all the support and encouragement from the larger community out there. Thanks so much for tuning in, challenging me, learning, and teaching me!

techblog100.mp4

Another one of those poi avenues that I've either barely touched or just haven't bothered to polish since I started playing with it: contact poi! In this case I've been working on the subtype wherein you're treating the poi head like a contact juggling ball. I'm totally awful at contact juggling (though learning), but I'm still trying to work through this related type of manipulation. Here are four manipulations that Elemensce helped me through at Wildfire and the tips that made them work.

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The last day at Firedrums, Alien Jon, Yuta, and I were playing with a pattern I could not for the life of me get: it's a switch that Ronan does between adjacent pendulum vs. CAP hybrids using a move in the middle I couldn't make out (he does it at 3:09 of his BJC performance video). After a couple weeks of futzing with it, I found the solution quite on accident--the middle move is cateye vs pendulum, a bizarre hybrid Ronan taught in one of his classes at Firedrums.

techblog91.mp4

I had a lot of footage from Firedrums that I couldn't get into the video I made last week, so I'm going to post a couple of the things that wound up on the editing room floor this week. Here is Alien Jon teaching a crowd of eager onlookers (including myself) how to create 6-petal antispin flowers out of pieces we're familiar with from box and diamond mode antispin flowers.

alienjon6petal.mp4