Had a chat with Noel on the Facebook Tech Poi group last week about cateye vs pendulum hybrids, more specifically those involving hand orbits rather than head orbits and wanted to try and find a way to perform the former given that I could already do the latter. Here is what came out: the idea is that you're performing two unit circles side-to-side and alternating which hand is performing them as a cateye and which hand is performing them as a pendulum.

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Christian posted a challenge on the Facebook Tech Poi group this past week asking for CAP vs cateye hybrid possibilities. Never one to back down from a challenge, I started working through it. I'll admit I haven't found anything yet that I feel is really that aesthetically pleasing, but here's what came out nonetheless.

techblog124.mp4

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

Just a funky pattern I played around with Sunday with Erik that it turns out yields some cool looking tunneling/composites. I took some video of the two of us doing the pattern together that I'll hopefully get posted in the next week. This is just a step-by-step of how the move is done.

techblog122.mp4

Ironically I've been running across a lot of tricks lately that involve airwrap transitions, so I'm making it a theme of the coming week. Here are two such moves: one that was theorized but not performed at Wildfire involves catching the poi in the shoulder and hand cradle that Marvin demonstrated at Burning Man, but then catching it in an airwrap when throwing it back out. Ted and I tried unsuccessfully to pull this move off on Friday night, but I've figured out the trick to make it work.

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A lesson on plane shifting including basic components, building blocks, and a few examples. In honor of a departed member of the poi community.

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The studio I teach at has moved from Takoma Park to Silver Spring and we're celebrating the move by offering a week of free classes, including poi!

This is a great opportunity for rote beginners to get free instruction to start them on the road to the playful and challenging world of object manipulation. If you've been wanting to learn or have learned only a couple tricks and would like to learn more, this is the perfect chance!

By popular demand: a follow-up to my last hoop tutorial, this time on the horizontal equivalent of the cateye pattern I demoed last time. It breaks down in a very similar fashion to the vertical, but requires a bit more wrist strength at a couple intervals. I've also included a brief discussion on how you can use both vertical and horizontal cateyes in conjunction with isolations and extensions to flow between tricks. This is a variation on Alien Jon's unit circle theory. For more info on this, visit his YouTube channel. Enjoy! :)

hooptutorialhorizontalcateyes.mp4

Here's a slightly late follow-up on my promise for a tutorial that shows the same arm warmups I posted last week, but this time rendered in same direction. Also a practical application of thinking of these movements in terms of the junction points between forward and reverse in turns.

armwarmuptutorialsamedirection.mp4

A student asked me to post online the arm warmups I have people do at the beginning of every class, so I've taken their advice and posted a tutorial on it here on YouTube. Due to limitations in the length of videos, this covers only two direction combinations: opposites split-time and opposites same-time. I'll be adding same direction same-time and same direction split-time soon. Enjoy!

armwarmuptutorialopposites.mp4