tutorial

Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Throws part 2

This week's tutorial covers throws that minimize the rotation of the poi, from float throws to plane-shifted throws, and finally no-beat throws. There's also a bit of inspiration here for how to play around with this type of movement and some of the fun things you can do with it.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #270: No-beat throws in triquetra vs pendulum

Here's a fun move that came out of a spin jam with Noel over the weekend at PEX Summer Festival: taking a no-beat throw and apply it to an antispin placement such that the top petal of triquetra vs pendulum winds up being a toss. This can be done either in front of the body or behind. I'm playing with my format a little bit a presenting the move both by narrating through it and showing it normal time and slowed down--let me know what you think of this format.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #269: Fishtail weaves

Another fishtail-based move from Kate's video a few months ago. This one incorporates a fishtail with a tic-tac on the other hand to create a weave with one hand performing the afore-mentioned contact move. Watch out--this one is even harder than learning the original fishtail was!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #267: Negative space and contact from horizontal body tracers

This was an interesting discovery based upon messing up a trick I was trying to do: there's a great way to take horizontal body tracers and use them as an entry point for negative space combos and contact rolls.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Contact forearm rolls

Contact rolls are one of my favorite moves. Here is a breakdown of how to do them on both the inner and outer forearm. They take a little bit of work, but they're a great tool to have in your box :)

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #266: Timing and direction in antibend toroids

I got a nifty challenge at Kinetic Fire Festival to perform a Zan's diamond toroid in same time opposites but to have the poi phased in same time opposites as well. It resulted in a pattern where the verticals remain in opposites but the horizontals switch to split time same direction. Strangely enough, if you try doing the same pattern in split time same direction both with poi and hands, the timing and direction remains consistent throughout the pattern. I'm taking this to mean that a lot of our rules for timing and direction no longer apply in the toroid world.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: My first hybrid

The very first hybrid I ever learned! Here is a quick tutorial on how to perform static spin vs extension. These lessons will serve you later when you get into more complex hybrids, but I think this is a fairly easy entry into this type of spinning :)

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #265: Toroids for the audience

This past week at Spin Summit, I noticed Kyle Ford from Chicago doing a really cool toroid-inspired move that struck me as a great use of the technique that was simple and eloquent and would jump out to an audience quite easily. Here's an adaptation of the technique, slightly techie-fied, of course ;)

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #264: inversions, introversions, and cross points

Sorry about the crap audio--my mic decided to go on the fritz today, I'm afraid :-P Here's a couple interesting ideas that came out of a brain decompression with Alien Jon at Spin Summit this past week in Colorado. I've been trying to sort out the difference between inversions, introversions, and their various brethren, but Jon suggested I instead focus on the cross points generated by different combinations of moving the poi between the arms. It resulted in some pretty nifty shapes, so give this one a whirl.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #263: Inverting the introversion (for realsies!)

Yeah, so I totally missed a step with last week's video on inverting the introversion. There's a bit that feels quite a bit like a barrel roll that comes after performing the introverted weave that adds a whole other layer of complexity to the movement. Here is the full move demoed. Good luck to those of you who opt to take this one on--it's a bear :-P

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