tech poi

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #234: Third-order antibrids (antispin/antispin)

This is something I saw Alien Jon demo when I was home in Colorado for the holidays--it combines third order motions (fractal flowers) with traditional flowers to create antibrids that move through space. Damien would call these antispin/antispin movements and I believe Mel, Poiboi, and a few others have demonstrated similar moves.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #233: Toroid H stalls

A follow-up from the toroid H concept from a couple weeks ago. This takes the same concept, but makes the toroid a ball instead of planet mode toroid and creates a cool stalling pattern out of it. Short but sweet--it's cold out there!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #232: Pentagram vs plane-bent pentagram atomic hybrid

This is a challenge that comes courtesy Dave "Honeybear" Foregger. While I was in Boston, he showed me a pentagram vs pentagram hybrid he'd been working on and it set my gears turning. It's a similar challenge to triangle vs triquetra, but the trochoid pentagram must travel much faster to stay in phase with the plane-bent variant, so synchronizing their movements can be a pain. This is also a great use of crane position done in different orientations.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #231: Triquetra vs pendulum stall hybrid family

I didn't realize until I saw Noel's video on the stall combo out of triquetra vs pendulum last week that this move was actually one of those transition spots for a hybrid family and it opened up a whole bunch of moves all at once. Here are two hybrids, a stack, an antispin flower, and Noel's cool stalling move that all overlap on that position. The more of these hybrid families get isolated, we can treat them almost like a circle of fifths to move between different hybrid groups.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #230: Triquetra vs pendulum stall combos

This is a move I cribbed from a recent Timmehtek that was one of those very eloquent movements that instantly made me go "why didn't I think of that?" Here are a few transitions out of it that I'm digging on. Noel published a video of his own a couple days ago that plays with some very similar moments--each of these transitions would work for any of those moves as well.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #229: Negative space body tracers

In an attempt to take some elements of snaking into a vertical place, I stumbled into a pattern that seemed to make use of both negative space framing as well as creating some lovely moments of isolation. I had a hard time figuring out how to do it on the opposite side of my body (hence re-recording this tech blog), but the results make for a very satisfying fusion of body tracer, negative space, and fountain.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #228: Plane-bent Zan's diamond

Some more fun toroid action based upon last week's work. It dawned on me as I was writing out the description for my video last week that many of the patterns we make with poi come down to creating trochoid derivatives of polygons our hands are nominally tracing out--but what if we used plane-bends to describe these shapes rather than creating the trochoids. Here I take this idea and apply it to Zan's diamond. Interestingly enough it takes a body through both directions of a buzz saw in vertical and horizontal plane.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #218: The Math of Poi part 2--roulettes for the unit circle

A follow-up to last week's poi math video. This one tells us how to determine the size of the hand path for poi when we're graphing out patterns using parametric equations. Includes properties of wavelength and amplitude among other nifty math concepts.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #217: Antispin snakes

Here's an interesting idea inspired by Mel's recent video of his workshop on snakes: I'd noticed that when he was practicing tracing along his arm that it was somewhat reminiscent of a box mode antispin flower that had been somewhat squashed. This reminded me of a concept that had been thrown out on the old Tribe tech poi group: the snake eye. This was a trick wherein you'd take a snake but perform it in antispin, theoretically creating cateyes around your shoulder. While Mel's arm tracer definitely doesn't produce a cateye, it does seem very compatible with snakes. Here's the result.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #216: The Math of Poi--Flowers, Roulettes, and Trochoids

People frequently reference the math behind poi on many forums and groups, but it can seem a little daunting to folks that don't have that kind of background. Here's an attempt to level the playing field. A lot of this will be review for the more mathematically inclined folks out there, but for those who aren't, hopefully this will give you the Cliff's Notes as to some of the math we use to describe flowers and the like and make it a little bit more digestible. If you like this, please leave me feedback as I've got plans in my mind to do a whole series of these kinds of videos :)

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