Here's another trick Ronan was showing off on the playa--based in pendulum vs CAP, he was doing a catch with the poi head that would then be used to shift the center of the pattern to either side. Another option was throwing the poi head vertically to enter static vs triquetra. I don't often play with head catching tricks, but these have a really fascinating capacity for shifting an audience's point of attention.

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In Tahoe, G showed me this nifty interior stall pattern he'd been playing with that I'd at first thought to be a mere curiosity. It involved searching for transitions where the hands were crossed and so were the poi, but as we continued to play with it, a nifty hybrid pattern came out and later G pointed out that Ronan's triquetra fractal could be used as an intermediary trick. Here are all the transitions we found that week.

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Here's a move I demoed in an Odds and Ends video a couple months ago, but was also a huge hit at Burning Man. The idea is to take something that is like a stall chaser and introduce both right angles and pendulum stalls into the mix. This essentially turns the move into a series of stalls done in staggered timing and theoretically also offers a great transition between horizontal stacks and vertical stacks.

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A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.

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Last week at the Tahoe Flow Arts Festival I got to take a nifty class from Ronan on advanced flowers. The class was really centered around creating the kinds of fractal motions that Damien has been referring to as third-order motions and that have a variety of other names. Zan's diamond is one example and it's shown here accompanied by the technique Ronan uses to get there. Even more intriguing were fractal breakdowns for triquetras and box-mode flowers. The triquetra fractal really has my brain running in particular. It's demoed here in 3 different timing and direction combinations.

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My second post-BM wrap up. Here's a couple moves I was playing with on the playa. I'm still digging on the hybrid family approach to finding transitions between moves and here are two that jumped out at me as I was playing in center camp. both are triquetra vs. pendulum combos, but one is at unit circle distance and another is with a hand-to-hand relationship. The unit circle distance one incorporates a stacking pattern from a recent tech blog--the combination of which is so delicious I haven't been able to stop playing with it since I found it.

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At Burning Man, Noel showed me this nifty combo that included elements of a number of different tricks that have showed up on this blog in the past few months and filled in a couple of the gaps between them in some very creative ways. This combo involves doing a pair of inspin vs antispin stalls that one then transforms into a hybrid before using the resulting alignment to create a horizontal stack. Tricky, but fun!

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Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

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At Summer Wildfire this past weekend, Ted showed me a really nifty way to stall a hoop while shoulder hooping I'd never seen before. Normally when I stall, I do so by reaching up under and behind the hoop as it's about to pass by my shoulder and push it back the way it just came. This stall involves taking the hand out of the hoop and trapping it between the body and inside of the upper arm, squeezing it to send it back the other direction.

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Kris Valles sent me a request a couple months ago for a tutorial on how to do this move out of a Nicky Evers video. It's not terribly hard, but it does teach some nifty body mechanics. It also results in one hell of a shitty night if you get motion sickness from it as I did ;)

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