This was totally one of those "duh" moments where I spotted other folks doing a particular trick and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get my hands to do it. But going the long way round actually turned out to be the better option because it helped me conceptualize how one could approach--here's how you can stagger stalls in a split-time place to produce a variety of nifty moves, including some that strongly resemble stall chasers and horizontal stacks.

techblog288.mp4

Some of my earliest tech blogs were on 1.5s and figuring out all the different types of them. A recent class from Ronan reminded me of some of this work and specifically a few ideas in them that I'd gotten wrong ;) Here is Ronan's approach to thinking about 1.5s and how timing direction work with them.

techblog287.mp4

The last day of Wildfire, Richard Cranium showed me a move he was working on, integrating cateyes into a stall chaser. Upon viewing the move, I thought the cateyes were looking more like inspin petals and tried to come up with a different approach to integrating cateyes into stall chasers. The result was less a chase move and a little more like a quarter time chase, but I do like the overall effect.

techblog279.mp4

This is the first time I've spun when I've spent as much time thinking about what my feet are doing as I did about what my poi were doing. I had a really epic flow session leading up to this and there's some laughably bad moments, but overall I feel like this is just as interesting to watch as some of my techier videos but in a very different sort of way.

footwerk12912.mp4

This tech blog featuring special guest star Ted Petrosky! We got together for a jam in Brooklyn and he showed me a nifty contact trick that starts with a shotgun-style single hand spiral wrap and it got my gears turning. Here are two fun variants that utilize some other tricks we know and love and that really look cool with this move added in for some extra spice.

techblog226.mp4

This week we go through the basic hip reel turn with our poi in same time, same direction. This teaches a very important concept in poi: when we turn, it appears the direction of poi rotation changes relative to us. Next week we'll go through hip reels in other timing and direction combinations.

turnspt2.mp4

My entry for the yearly Christmas tech vid challenge!

christmas2011.mp4

Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

techblog189.mp4

Joanna Drummond spins fans Saturday night Wildfire Summer 2011

joannasummerwf2011.mp4