This is a challenge Ky threw out to a group of us hanging out at Kinetic: if a snake can be thought of as an isolation around the shoulder, can we then make it into a hybrid? Here are two examples: iso vs extension and iso vs cateye that expand on the idea.

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This comes from a FLAME challenge: Gina McGrath wanted to see a pentagram vs 2-petal inspin hybrid and Mike Parisi was the first to come up with a solution. I at first thought it was cheating because the hands oscillated between split and same time opposites but then realized what was actually happening was that both the patterns were completing simultaneously. Because the pentagram is a 1.5 downbeat move, it forces the pattern into this type of polyrhythm hand use. That set up a whole lot of exploration for different approaches to polyrhythms.

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This is one of those really obvious a ha moments I can't believe I didn't catch onto earlier: most of the transitions out of triquetra vs pendulum I've played with thus far have been at either the top, bottom, or side positions of the move. But if you attempt a transition at 45 degrees off of the top position, the poi heads are in the perfect position for a quarter-time transition! Here are three patterns that make use of this phenomenon.

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The follow-up to my vid on Zan's diamond in all the different timing and direction combinations and polyrhythm hybrids. Here I demo all the monorhythm/even beat hybrids for Zan's diamond and discuss third-order CAPs, including the S-CAP and how it can work inside the Zan's diamond algorithm.

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Do all even beat hybrids have an accompanying body tracer? That's the question I posed after playing around with some of the body tracers Ted Petrosky taught in his workshop on the same topic at FLAME Festival. After tweaking one of the tracers he'd taught just slightly, I realized it was very similar to a body tracer I'd learned from Thomas "Nevisoul" Johansson. The original tracer he'd taught me turned out to also function as a 4-petal antispin vs 2-petal inspin hybrid.

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Last week as I was working out Zan's diamond with toroids, Kory San made a request for a video on Zan's diamond and its accompanying hybrids. I'm splitting this into two videos: this first one covers the basic algorithms of Zan's diamond as a third-order motion and the polyrhythm hybrids that are available as a result of thinking of each section of the shape as a discrete triquetra. Next week I'll cover some variants that are even-downbeat and thus timing and direction remain consistent throughout.

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A couple years ago when I was traveling through Africa, my host wrote a computer program for me that worked both as a poi simulator as well as a mathematical tool for measuring the distance a poi head travels in each hypo and epitrochoid pattern I could dream up at the time. After comparing a lot of the numbers the program created, it turns out there are some really fascinating harmonic relationships that emerge when you combine moves that normally wouldn't go together as a result of a lack of alignment with either the poi heads or hands.

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This is a challenge that comes courtesy Dave "Honeybear" Foregger. While I was in Boston, he showed me a pentagram vs pentagram hybrid he'd been working on and it set my gears turning. It's a similar challenge to triangle vs triquetra, but the trochoid pentagram must travel much faster to stay in phase with the plane-bent variant, so synchronizing their movements can be a pain. This is also a great use of crane position done in different orientations.

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I didn't realize until I saw Noel's video on the stall combo out of triquetra vs pendulum last week that this move was actually one of those transition spots for a hybrid family and it opened up a whole bunch of moves all at once. Here are two hybrids, a stack, an antispin flower, and Noel's cool stalling move that all overlap on that position. The more of these hybrid families get isolated, we can treat them almost like a circle of fifths to move between different hybrid groups.

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This is a move I cribbed from a recent Timmehtek that was one of those very eloquent movements that instantly made me go "why didn't I think of that?" Here are a few transitions out of it that I'm digging on. Noel published a video of his own a couple days ago that plays with some very similar moments--each of these transitions would work for any of those moves as well.

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