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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #292: One-handed Superman

This is a meteor-inspired move from the glowsticking community. Marvin Ong was the first to show it to me and both Kate McCoy and Noel Yee have done some cool expansions on this idea. I'd had a rough time learning how to do it because my one-handed poi isn't terribly good, but I'd come up with at least one trick that had made it easier. Here's how I made it work for myself.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #291: Inversions and crosspoints

After learning how to do inversions in Tog-Opposites, I noticed something peculiar about the arrangement of the cross points in all the opposite direction inversions I'd played with--they always appeared to be pointing away from each other while the inversions I'd worked with in split-time same direction tended always to have the crosspoint in the same direction. Question is: is it diagnostic of how inversions work or a cool byproduct of them?

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Corkscrews

Corkscrews are usually the first floor plane move that many poi spinners learn. It's fundamentally a chase move with the hands moving up and down the body while the poi rotate in a horizontal plane. Here are a few tricks on how to get down this trick.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #290: Timing and direction in pentagrams

Kind of random, I know, but I've spent the past few months working out all the different same direction phasings for antispin pentagrams. The end goal here is to get them down in toroids, but I figured starting here might be the low hanging fruit :) The funny thing is that all these phasings are really reflections of each other. If you think of each point skipped has having a number value to it, then 1 and 4 are identical save for the hand that is leading through the pattern. Likewise, 2 and 3 are the same except that the positions of the hands are reversed in each increment.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #289: Split-opposites inversions

I was showed these at Wildfire this past year as I was wrestling with trying to learn inversions in opposites (my problem was I was trying to do them in opposites same time), but now they're presentable! Here they are as a 4-beat split-time thread the needle and as an element of Zan's diamond in split-opposites.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Under the legs

Under the legs tricks tend to pass in and out of vogue, but the underlying concept has a lot in common with the reel turns we've played with before. Here are a couple basic exercises to get the basic elements down.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #288: Staggered stalls

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.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #287: Timing and direction in 1.5s

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.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Behind the Back part 3

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.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #286: Leo's vertical stack

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.

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