Tech Blog

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #274: 3:3 hybrids as body tracers part 1

Back at FLAME Festival in Georgia, Kory San and I had an interesting conversation after watching some of Ted Petrosky's body tracers. We realized that many of the body tracers he was performing could also be considered hybrids and we wondered then whether all hybrids that mashed up inspin and antispin flowers would have body tracer corollaries.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #273.5 inversions as crosspoints detail

Several weeks ago I uploaded a tech blog based upon a conversation Alien Jon and I had at Spin Summit wherein he outlined the idea that one could think of inversions and introversions as creating different cross-point locations around the hands. I did a video outlining this idea, but the feedback I got was that I was too far away from the camera to make the concept clear. Here are all the different cross-points revisited and demonstrated in two angles with slow-mo.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #273: pendulum vs extension hybrids

Back at IgNight Festival in LA, I worked on a hybrid I'd never seen performed before that mixed up an isolated pendulum and a unit circle extension. By strange coincidence, I happened to see Ronan use another hybrid based in pendulums and extensions, but his used a CAP and a point isolation to achieve a slightly different effect. The two moves utilize a very similar kind of movement and work together really well.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #272: Making a routine!

I have a performance coming up with Contradiction Dance for which I had to come up with a solo poi piece. Here's a couple sections of the piece that I've been working on in the past couple weeks. I'm sharing them because I'm hoping that the choices I made in putting these elements together will help some of you out there working on your own pieces.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #271: 3 hand-switching throws

A grab-bag of hand-switching throws I've either been working on or have encountered in the past couple months. The first is a triquetra vs pendulum hand switch Noel came up with during the same spin jam where I started working on the triquetra vs pendulum throw from the last tech blog. The second is a hand-switch that comes out of a snake that I've had a hell of a time getting clean these past few months. The third is a hand-switch I spotted Matt Cullen using a lot during a spin session he did at PEX Summer Festival.

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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 #268: Toroid hexagrams

I've demonstrated the unicursal hexagram on this blog before, but it's only been recently that I've been able to perform a more regular hexagram--the type that looks like a Star of David with a pair of overlapping triangles. Here are two approaches to making it. One has one point up and one down and the other has the points out to the side.

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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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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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