In the final installment of this behind the back series, we'll tackle the meltdown! Meltdowns are a move in which one rapidly wraps the poi around their back, unwraps them, and then rewraps them going the other direction to create a rapid and exciting move. Here's how to build them up piece by piece.
At the Tahoe Flow Festival, Leo showed me this nifty vertical stack that I quickly realized could be used to stack up and down each side of the body. It requires some deft timing, but has a really unique effect.
A few months back, Alex Powell from the Vulcan published an interesting treatise on his approach to toroids. There's been a second school of thought that's come out of meetings at Wildfire and other East Coast fire events and this is my best attempt to consolidate a lot of the thinking on this type of spinning and make it ready for the masses.
Last week we worked out some basic exercises to acclimate the body to behind the back spinning--this week we'll work on the behind the back weave. Fundamentally this weave is identical to the standard three-beat weave but requires a little bit of practice to adapt to a behind the back position. Here are a couple exercises to get you there.
At Burning Man this year, Arashi took me through his approach to spinning in atomics. It took a couple hours, but ultimately I came to understand it was a system with significant differences to other 3D systems I was familiar with--most notably with Maiki Nope's 3D timing and direction system. Here's a brief encapsulation of the idea.
The Playpoi website tipped me off on this--a ten minute compilation of some of the greatest and most influential performers and videos in the history of our art. Give it a look-see for a smattering of the best our art has to offer :)
(for added fun, click on the Closed Caption link in the bottom bar to get the name of each video and the artist in it as it pops up)
A few weeks ago, Alex Powell uploaded a great video of some interesting hybrids utilizing toroids in an atomic configuration. I started working on these same hybrids in other timing and direction combinations as well as some pendulum-based toroid hybrids after taking a pendulums class from Ronan in Tahoe. Here are the results.
Behind the back tricks are one of those bellwethers that can take you from basic to intermediate spinning, but it can be a huge kinesthetic challenge to get to a point where these types of tricks can feel stable and in control. This week we'll start off with some basic exercises to teach control of behind the back movements before playing with behind the back weaves next week and meltdowns the week after.
At long last--I know how to lovelace! Lovelacing is an trick related to inversions that Ky Lee from Atlanta specializes in. Several times I've tried to learn it from him, but what finally made it click was a video Kory San posted on the topic. Here is an explanation of how it works and how to go about getting into it.
Based upon a debate currently going on on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook, here are some ruminations on weaves and inversions. If we think of weaves as being specific shapes that can be divorced from the movements of the body, there are a lot of expressions of a three-beat weave. Here I demonstrate one that shares some characteristics with inversions.
