Over the weekend I started messing around with a slightly different approach to triquetra vs pendulum and found it opened up some transition points I rarely use but found to be really fun to incorporate into my flow. In this case I was playing with triquetra vs pendulum with the hands in opposites same-time and looking to the transition points on either side of the pattern, which can access static vs extension or same time same direction hybrids.

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Here's another trick Ronan was showing off on the playa--based in pendulum vs CAP, he was doing a catch with the poi head that would then be used to shift the center of the pattern to either side. Another option was throwing the poi head vertically to enter static vs triquetra. I don't often play with head catching tricks, but these have a really fascinating capacity for shifting an audience's point of attention.

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In Tahoe, G showed me this nifty interior stall pattern he'd been playing with that I'd at first thought to be a mere curiosity. It involved searching for transitions where the hands were crossed and so were the poi, but as we continued to play with it, a nifty hybrid pattern came out and later G pointed out that Ronan's triquetra fractal could be used as an intermediary trick. Here are all the transitions we found that week.

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A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.

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Last week at the Tahoe Flow Arts Festival I got to take a nifty class from Ronan on advanced flowers. The class was really centered around creating the kinds of fractal motions that Damien has been referring to as third-order motions and that have a variety of other names. Zan's diamond is one example and it's shown here accompanied by the technique Ronan uses to get there. Even more intriguing were fractal breakdowns for triquetras and box-mode flowers. The triquetra fractal really has my brain running in particular. It's demoed here in 3 different timing and direction combinations.

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My second post-BM wrap up. Here's a couple moves I was playing with on the playa. I'm still digging on the hybrid family approach to finding transitions between moves and here are two that jumped out at me as I was playing in center camp. both are triquetra vs. pendulum combos, but one is at unit circle distance and another is with a hand-to-hand relationship. The unit circle distance one incorporates a stacking pattern from a recent tech blog--the combination of which is so delicious I haven't been able to stop playing with it since I found it.

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A couple weeks ago I started playing with a variant on a stacking move I've seen Mel and Poiboi play with, but changed what I perceived the timing and direction of the pattern to be. The result felt asymmetric and so after learning it on both sides, I set about figuring out how to switch between them using a wallplane flower in antispin. I then realized it fits in well with the hybrid family I demoed a couple tech blogs back and threw in a triquetra vs pendulum for good measure.

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Here's another hybrid family based upon a particular poi orientation--this one being hands together and poi apart. Triquetra vs pendulum, Mel's horizontal stack, point isolation walking, and stall chasers all make use of this alignment. Like the other hybrid families I've demonstrated on this video blog, it's a great tool for transitions.

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More random combos I've been playing with--lots of stuff based upon the idea of breaking out of triquetra vs pendulum into various other patterns and back, plus a couple cool horizontal stacks with body tracers based upon some things Charlie, Alien Jon, and I played with back when they were in town and some ideas Ky Lee threw into the mix last weekend. Finally, some one-handed stuff I've been dying to put in a video and couldn't think of a better way to use :)

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Here's an attempt to tie together a whole bunch of different threads from some recent videos both myself and some others have made. First up, e6 posted a video over the weekend about timing and direction where he pointed out the difficulties in making the traditional T&D combinations work with flowers that have an odd number of petals. In an odd bit of synchronicity, Justin Benson posted a video displaying an example of just that--wherein he takes a pentagram into split opposites by creating two pentagrams that reflect each other across a given axis.

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