My video blog is now a year old--huzzah! Starting off with a switch between hybrid stall switches and CAPs as shown by Mel in his latest performance video, I play around more with these types of stall switches and how you can plane shift with them or get in and out of them from any split-time same direction stall. Also, a stall pattern out of flowers demoed in a recent Nick Woolsey video, my hyperloops are looking better, and a short exploration of the type of horizontal antispin flower plane shifts that G has become famous for.

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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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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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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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A demo of the cube Charlie demonstrated for me at Wildfire--this takes seven plane shifts to accomplish and works through crossed arms, wall plane, and buzzsaw positions. A real challenge, but a fun one! Next up is a plane-changing pattern that works between opposites same-time and corkscrew into a kind of pendulum stall before reversing itself into the exact same pattern it started as. I really like how the reverse of this pattern is itself, whereas reversing most poi sequences require you to reverse the directions of all your movements.

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At Wildfire, Charlie and I worked through all the four compass points of a cateye and worked out the stalls that transitioned out of each point--there is some crossover here with the Yuta stalls I was playing with two weeks ago. The thing that's got my brain burning (and unfortunately I haven't had shit for time to play with them) is elliptical CAP patterns of the type Zan is showing off in the Encyclo-Poi-Dia 2. My initial breakdown of this move turned out to be incorrect, so I'll be working out the proper iterations of it in the coming week.

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Starting off with an utterly bizarre pattern--the same-time opposites CAP performed with the extension in wall plane and the antispin petal in corkscrew plane. The idea for this came from a post Dyami made about the idea of a unit sphere on the Tech Poi forum of Tribe.net. I think the concept is a dead-end, but trying to prove it has led to some really interesting patterns, including a 3D triquetra I play with in here. Also, the transition from butterfly top-stall to hybrid that I couldn't include last week is in here and finally I'm working turns into my stall intensive.

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More fun with Yuta stalls! Specifically, it turns out that they work just as well with floats as they do with top and bottom stalls, opening the door to doing them in tandem with isolations, extensions, hybrids and cateyes. Also, some more footwork and danciness inspired by nightanddaydance's excellent response to my last blog. Had to trim a couple tricks out to keep it under 10 minutes, but they should be making an appearance in a later blog.

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It's my dirty little secret that I've been working my ass off on my stalls to make those Yuta-style plane shifting stalls cleaner. While I can do them just fine if my right hand is on bottom, when my left hand is on bottom, the horizontal plane wobbles a depressingly wide amount. An interesting exercise I began playing with today was doing a pair of top-stalls, Yuta-stalling behind me, coming out as though in a bottom stall, bottom stall again, Yuta stalling once again, and coming out as though from a top stall, then reversing the whole thing.

After seeing a Nick Woolsey instructional vid on how to do the triquetra the other day, I discovered a figure I really dug under the wikipedia entry for the word triquetra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triquetra) called a Carolingian Cross, which essentially amounts to a compound interlacing triquetra. I've spent a good portion of the week dissecting the figure and trying to figure out how to render it with poi. Here are three of the options I've played with.

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