There's been some chat in the past week about zero points and how they differentiate from plane bends and even whether they do so at all. Here's my take on the concept (which, rarely enough for poi seems to be very internally logical ;) and how one can think of plane changing as being something of a sliding scale where on one end the poi stops moving (zero point) and on the other the hand stops moving (orbing).

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Last video we rolled through three different approaches to defining CAPs. Here is an alternate approach to breaking down such motions: a couple years ago, Alien Jon introduced me to the idea of spinning composites. Compositing is chaining together increments of poi movement that overlap in hand and poi position to either create repeatable patterns or transition and shift seamlessly between patterns.

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The question of what constituted a CAP recently came up both in the Tech Poi and Vulcan Tech Gospel groups on Facebook. Here are what I'd consider to be the three main approaches to describing a CAP--in my next video, I'm going to detail a slightly different approach to this question and some of the cool patterns that come not from trying to classify all the CAPs, but from taking the lessons that learning CAPs provide and applying them to more complex types of motion.

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More throws for your consumption--this time a type of toss I've heard both Erik and Ted refer to as a "sneaky toss". It's something like a float throw but performed in such a way that it seems to continue a static or small extension motion, rather than requiring a loop like isolated or overhead tosses. It's an integral component in a type of toss weave I've seen Poiboi do in his videos and a fun sneaky toss switch that G showed me while he was in town. I think his version finished differently, but I like the properties the version I'm doing here has.

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Whoa...white balance what? Anys, I've done a lot of videos lately on the concept of the toroid flower, and I wanted to revisit it from a place of flow--that is how toroid flowers can be combined with other types of spinning, specifically the 2D spinning we're more traditionally used to. Outlined here are two methods: plane-bending a toroid into the traditional plane orientation or imagining toroids that overlap on a single point and therefore create a junction to switch from one to another. Happy flowing! :)

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There was a blink-and-you-might miss it moment in my video on timing and direction in toroid flowers that struck me as I was playing with them earlier today: namely, that toroids are direction agnostic. You can change the direction of the hand as you're performing one and keep the toroid in whatever mode you started in, be it antispin or isolation. This means that it inherits many of the mix-and-match capabilities from staff and clubs that we find with tools that aren't gravity dependent and opens up the field of what we can do with them a lot wider.

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This was a fun journey: over the weekend my friend Sean Stogner in New York reminded me of a move Marvin Ong and I had worked on in center camp at Burning Man this past year. It's a variant of the diamond split into two triquetras but each hand is working a different split, so they overlap in a quadrant. After experimenting with switching which hand was doing which split, I realized it was leading toward a third-order motion in which the hands would chase each other while the poi phased between quarter and split-time same direction.

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A couple weeks ago, I posted a video of Arashi teaching a class at Firedrums and in it, I was struck by the fact that his "crane" atom had a strong resemblance to together-L in Maiki Nope's breakdown of atomic planes for clubs and poi. If this similarity bears out, it would mean in essence that there are 3 different atomics that can be spun from a variety of angles, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Atomic spinners: how does this gel with the world you play in?

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In a follow-up to a video I posted a couple weeks back of playing with triquetra vs pendulum in same time opposites, I realized the transition there that let me hit static vs extension and kind of "unfold" my crossed arms also existed with CAPs if the poi are spinning same time same direction. Here is the transition used both to get from a top-side CAP to bottom and vice-versa.

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Over the weekend, e6 posted an awesome video exploring the toroid flower concept and really cleaning up some of the work with it to the point that the shapes are really reading and finding definition as something unique. It's inspired a lot of experiments this week, but I wanted to start with laying out all the four timing and direction combinations for these types of flowers. You can see Erik's original video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHsUwal8Ms0

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