Wow...I was super exhausted when I recorded this and it came out really sloppy. Hopefully y'all will forgive me for this :-P Anys, over the weekend in an effort to expand my vocabulary in horizontal plane, I tried adapting one of my favorite moves in vertical plane: back-to-back triquetras, and stick it into horizontal plane. Here are four variants: the first is just to take the move exactly as it is and bring the hands together near the head as you're switching back to the original position. Watch out! It's REALLY easy to club yourself in the head with this move.

techblog123.mp4

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

At Wildfire, Charlie and Baz came up with an interesting pattern that switches between right angles similar to some stacking patterns Ronan demonstrated earlier this year. I noticed that one side-effect of the pattern was that it forced the poi head to follow the length of the leash when switching positions, and started looking for other patterns that exhibited this same characteristic. Here is the first one that I've found.

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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 :)

techblog118.mp4

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.

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Uploading videos here in Africa has proven to be such a production that I think this might be the last one I get to upload before coming home, but keep an eye out just in case I change my mind ;) Here are two methods for switching which hand is performing CAP and which hand is performing pendulum in the CAP vs pendulum antibrid I've been working to death lately. The first method switches both moves to isolated pendulums and when the orientation of the hands is reversed, we return to the original move.

techblog111.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

I made a stop this past weekend at Nairobi National Park just outside the city to take in some wildlife and untouched African wilderness and it gave me the perfect opportunity to record a video! I know I've been doing a lot with pendulum vs CAP lately and I probably will keep on doing so because what I'm finding is so much fun! Here I've been working to put together a point isolation with a pendulum to create the illusion of the two poi moving together like a single line.

techblog109.mp4

So if I've uploaded the right video (the computer I'm currently on won't view mp4 videos, so I'm making a guess at which video on the camera is the right one), you should all be seeing a transition from a cross-shaped plane shift to CAP vs. pendulum utilizing essentially an inverted linear isolation and a isolated pendulum to line the poi up the proper way to go into pendulum vs. CAP and back. Really, though, it was just an excuse to shoot a tech blog my first few days here in Kenya. Enjoy! :)

techblog108.mp4