A couple weeks ago, Poiboi uploaded a new tech video and as I was watching it, I noticed an element of his style that had escaped me before but presented a good opportunity to woodshed a poi element I rarely use: throws. Specifically, I noticed that Poiboi frequently uses isolated throws to accomplish his timing and direction changes rather than 1.5s or stalls. I've been playing in the past week with doing isolated throws in all the same-time configurations I can think of, both in the same direction and not, plane-shifted, etc. Here are some of the results.

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Another fun trick that came out of the retreat in Connecticut, Charlie on that Saturday night pulled out a fun box-mode move that utilized inspin and antispin stalls to define the corners of the box. I added a V vs. V transition to switch which corner the action was focused on and Charlie suggested using it as a setup for making a horizontal switch. We use this combo to create at 3D composite where we switch positions in the Wesleyan video.

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I spent the weekend hanging out with some of my very favorite spinners at Wesleyan University's Winter Fire Arts Festival. While there, Insignia suggested to me that I try horizontal stacks in atomic planes and a funky boxing pattern emerged. I realize before long that depending on the type of stack I was doing, that I could then plane shift out of it and resolve to a more familiar move. Thanks for the suggestion, Christian!

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A couple months ago I posted a tutorial on plane-changing that was heavily focused on vertical plane-shifts. Lately I've been playing with a couple exercises that have really been helping to nail down the stuff in floor plane and thought I'd share them. Enjoy!

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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.

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Remember that funky thing I played with last week that combined elements of CAPs, floats, stalls, and extensions? Well I put it into wallplane and found that just like it's wheelplane cousin, it opens up the doors to lots of transitions to wallplane CAPs, antispins, plane-shifts, and more. This pattern is reminding me more and more of Charlie's concept of totipotent patterns that can switch between timing and direction combinations.

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In his "Red Pants" video, Mel demonstrated a trick wherein he alternated hands performing pendulum and top stalls to create a cool pattern that switches between the relationship of hands to each other and poi to each other. Erik reminded me of this trick before I left for the playa and we spent a whole afternoon messing with it at Vulcantown during Burning Man. We added floats, isolated pendulums, plane shifts, and more to it. Here are all the variants I can remember.

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I started out by trying to figure out how to integrate G-style plane shifts with the ubiquitous triquetra vs pendulum hybrid and realized I'd never played with the other three arrangements of it: pointing the odd petal to either side or down while maintaining the pendulum in the other hand. It led to some odd timings, but did make the plane shifts I'd originally wanted to play with doable. The one with the petal pointed down also seems to integrate well with the same time same direction moves Yuta was showing me at Firedrums. Cool stuff!

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I've spent a big portion of the past week trying to polish my plane shifts from antispin flowers to horizontal plane antispins and I wanted to share a couple of the drills I've been doing to get there. Mostly I've been taking same-time opposites flowers and plane shifting out of the sideways stalls and then executing a 90 degree turn. Being as how there are two directions of same time opposites antispin flowers to work with, the big mind-bender I've been working on this past week is switching between these two types with every turn.

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At Wildfire I got a good chance to run my transition theory through the ringer and I got some great feedback from some folks I really respected about it. One of the more fun collaborations was Sunday with Charlie and Justin. Charlie and I essentially hadn't slept and spent most of the day working out the theoretical framework in which hard, soft, and mixed transitions could be applied to plane bending and shifting. We came up with a couple new moves neither of us had ever seen before and laid the foundation for what I hope will be a really nifty expansion of the theory. Thanks, guys! :)

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