This tech blog featuring special guest star Ted Petrosky! We got together for a jam in Brooklyn and he showed me a nifty contact trick that starts with a shotgun-style single hand spiral wrap and it got my gears turning. Here are two fun variants that utilize some other tricks we know and love and that really look cool with this move added in for some extra spice.

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Kind of a fun brain/kinesthetic workout that came out of a trick I've seen G and Ronan do wherein they play 4-petal antispin against a static spin to create hybrid moments at either side of the body. I took that same idea to a vertical place to start, and then placed the top position behind the head to add a body tracer flavor to the overall movement. Don't know if it has any good performance applications but it definitely gives the brain something to chew on :)

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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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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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I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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200 tech blogs! This one is on how I've been working to create the hybrid families I've been frequently featuring in my videos over the course of the past year--I have two methods I use these days and this is the more visual one: finding the "lines" of the poi tricks to figure out how to switch between them. Sorry for the weird cuts--I had to get it under 15 minutes :-P

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I've been mapping out hybrids lately that utilize a relationship between the hands and realized I'd been assuming the handle was synonymous with the hands. I then started to think about cases in which the handles could be together but not necessary have the hands together. The first hybrid I played with seemed too easy, so I started doing it with an outer forearm roll and it led both to  isolation vs extension and triquetra vs pendulum hybrids.

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Over the weekend I started messing around with a slightly different approach to triquetra vs pendulum and found it opened up some transition points I rarely use but found to be really fun to incorporate into my flow. In this case I was playing with triquetra vs pendulum with the hands in opposites same-time and looking to the transition points on either side of the pattern, which can access static vs extension or same time same direction hybrids.

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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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