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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Last week, a poi spinner by the name of Joe Graff stopped into DC and e6 and I got the chance to hang out and spin with him in Malcolm X Park. He showed off a type of stacking I'd seen in videos but hadn't quite parsed out, but when performed in person realized represented an approach to compounding horizontal stacks that opened the door for switching up the alignments of poi and hand in many of the stacks that we play with.

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A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.

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This is a little bit of an experiment in interactivity with this vlog. I've played a lot in recent videos with the concept of a hybrid family--a move that will interlock with other moves at a specific or multiple positions. I've take this idea to the point where I can take some of my favorite moves and at each of the 4 compass points be able to transition to a completely different type of move. In this vid I demo triquetra vs pendulum and use it to switch to a point isolation, a windmill, a horizontal stack, and a unit circle hybrid.

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By popular request, here is the breakdown of how I do the plane-bendy diagonal thing from my last odds and ends video. It's essentially just a corkscrew with a lockout on either side that has been plane-bent to put the lockouts in a diagonal plane. One of the cool things about this, then, is that it integrates well with another diagonal plane-bending move that Alien Jon demoed in the Arizona Transmission video a couple years ago.

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