After an awesome couple weeks hanging out with some of my favorite poi spinners on the east coast, I've gotten to learn a lot about split-time stall shifts in the style of Rastaxel. Insignia has been taking these and adding a plane-bent flourish in the middle. I showed this pattern to Baz and he came up with an over the arm stall. I added a Yuta stall shift to Baz's motion and though it looks sloppy I've been having a lot of fun with it. I think I may have prematurely christened the spherical CAP--I described it by the pattern it adds up to rather than its component pieces.

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I've been lucky enough that the past couple weeks I've gotten to catch up with some of my favorite east coast poi spinners and gotten to shoot a little bit of video of some of the cool tricks they've been working on. Here's the first of two videos: Baz Simon doing some plane-bending tech at our friend Aaron's (Fractal) wedding.

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At boomboat over the weekend, Christian pointed out to me that all my CAP plane-bending experiments had overlooked a very obvious possibility: performing a CAP in horizontal plane. This, it turns out, is also an awesome transition to diagonal plane CAPs. Also, A bizarre property of CAP transitions into full-arm movements. It turns out that the four basic combinations of timing and directions have three transition points with the most common CAPs, so halving a flower gives you three of the four combinations--not two. Any mathematicians can tell me why?

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Starting off with a couple tricks I'd consider to be a little bit older school style tech than I usually work with--the first is inspired by rope dart tricks that shoot the head off in the opposite direction it's been wrapped in. Next is a trick that uses releases to transition from meltdown to behind-the-back waistwraps and back. This is sketchy! Next, in order to get down the spherical CAPs I've been working on the past few weeks, I've been doing drills to get my hands used to doing quarter-beat stalls in same-time opposites.

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Waiting for an oil change gave me a perfect chance to try out some flow! Not terribly dancey or big in footwork, but there are some cool experiments with pendulums, wraps, and LOTS of plane-changing here. Not all of it works terribly well, but there are some cool transitions in here. Also--some attempts at dropping the spherical CAP pattern into flow. Enjoy!

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I'm trying to think if there are two more different skills I could have spent the last week playing with. Among the gaps in my knowledge are airwraps and how to get out of hyperloops. This week I finally set down to learn how this type of motion works and by and large the practice has been paying off. Also I've spent a lot of time working on the spherical CAP pattern I theorized about last week, breaking it down to each incremental movement.

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Based upon a pendulum stall trick Baz taught me a few months ago, here's a variant that makes use of plane-bending out of stalls. Also: I've been working a lot more with elliptical CAP patterns and have a presentable version of the split-time opposites pattern. Finally, based upon Charlie's responses to my video on CAPs and plane-bending last week, a little bit of theory and three approaches to taking elliptical CAP patterns to spherical CAP patterns. One is (very roughly) demoed. Give me another week and we'll see if I can put together the others cleanly.

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So regrettably these didn't come out as clean as I'd hoped, but I think there's still enough here to give folks some ideas of what's possible when you combine CAPs and plane-bending. I know there's a lot of stuff that could have been demoed but wasn't--I'll hopefully fill in gaps as time goes on or if this gives some of you out there ideas, I'd love to see some responses.

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