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 commenter on my video about the crosser archer weave reminded me of a move Kate had demoed last year at Kinetic and in one of Noel's videos. I dug it back up to see what it had in common with the move I'd just played with. The answer: very little, but it was still a hell of a fun challenge :)

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The second in my transition tools series. This week we're talking about stalls--when you stop the poi's momentum and have the ability to reverse the direction of the poi if you want. Included here is a breakdown of how stalls work. Yay charts! :D

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A challenge from Jeffrey Bird on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook--he wanted to see Zan's diamond rendered in opposites split-time in toroids. It took a little bit of doing, but I actually think it's far cleaner than the split-time same direction version I demoed a couple weeks ago. Bonus: I also decided to demo the same-time opposites version of the pattern.

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Part 1 of transition tools--tricks you can use to switch between other tricks! This is on pendulums and 1.5s. Pendulums work by not allowing the poi to complete a circle and because of that they switch direction whenever they reach the height of their arc. One move that makes use of this phenomenon is the 1.5 beat weave and in this video I demo both how to learn the 1.5 beat weave and how to use it to switch to other moves.

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Taking threads from the past three weeks worth of videos: how to chain together the forwards weave, reverse weave, windmill, and weave turn together into a fountain variant that has some body tracer elements. This move can be done either inspin or antispin and sets up a lot of great moves down the line.

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Here's a move that came out of a skill exchange I had over the weekend with Charles Hinton in Atlanta. He showed me a nifty pendulum-based move that was designed to teach BTB air wraps. I didn't have a lot of luck with the pattern as he'd laid it out, but I decided to work out a different approach to air wraps behind the back and have had some limited successes.

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I'm wrapping up the poi flower series with this vid on antispin. Antispin could really be its own video series entirely, so I'm just giving a couple different approaches to creating antispin petals in this video and letting people take the exercises used in the previous videos in this series to extrapolate the different timing and direction combinations. If you'd like to see a full series on antispin, please let me know!

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Something a little different: I've been trying to come up with some bite-sized chunks of how my work in modern dance has been informing my poi spinning these past few months and here's a small but easy to learn bit that involves teaching your body core to move around in a circle in a way that interacts with your arms in very interesting ways.

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A follow-up to last weeks video on the triangle third-order antibrid. I started modeling the shapes that are generated by putting various third-order motions over antispin flowers and came up with some intriguing results. Here are third-order antibrids for cateye, triquetra, 4-petal antispin, and an inspin version of the triquetra one.

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