At PDF, Joe Graff showed me a most fascinating move he'd been working on ever since he saw Pineapple Pete and G's video "The Airwrap Reloaded" in which the two posit that the airwrap is the oldest type of plane bend in poi. Taking a cue from this, Joe used an airwrap to plane bend into planes that were 90 degrees offset, resulting in an atomic. I found that with a little tweaking, this same combo could be used to reverse the direction of the airwrap as well.

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Ironically I've been running across a lot of tricks lately that involve airwrap transitions, so I'm making it a theme of the coming week. Here are two such moves: one that was theorized but not performed at Wildfire involves catching the poi in the shoulder and hand cradle that Marvin demonstrated at Burning Man, but then catching it in an airwrap when throwing it back out. Ted and I tried unsuccessfully to pull this move off on Friday night, but I've figured out the trick to make it work.

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At Wildfire, Charlie and Baz came up with an interesting pattern that switches between right angles similar to some stacking patterns Ronan demonstrated earlier this year. I noticed that one side-effect of the pattern was that it forced the poi head to follow the length of the leash when switching positions, and started looking for other patterns that exhibited this same characteristic. Here is the first one that I've found.

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I got a lot of emails and comments last week asking me about a trick I had done during my performance at Wildfire's performance class last Sunday, specifically the one I'd done at roughly 2:30 in it. Here is an explanation of the move--it's a variant on Charlie's 8-step CAP pattern used as a transition between same time same direction hybrids and the wall plane antispin flower that's really a pair of triquetras that I tend to overuse frequently in performances. It's not earth-shattering, but I like the effect of it :)

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Over the weekend at Wildfire, we played around some more with Mel's top stall vs. pendulum pattern from the "Red Pants" video. Charlie found an interesting inversion of it wherein the leading hand performs a float rather than a topstall, making the internal alignment on each side a hand to poi relationship rather than hand to hand, thus allowing you to drop out of the move into static spin vs extension or a host of other moves. Even better, it's totally easy to switch between both variants.

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A couple contact tricks from Burning Man that Marvin taught me the last day on the playa. The first is a really cool float throw to cradle and catching the handle on the shoulder before tossing the poi out and catching the handle again. It seems to me like this one is crying out for some uber-cool last step. Anybody have any ideas? The next trick is a Ronan move, catching the head on the shoulder and sending the handle flinging around horizontally to catch it again behind the back.

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Remember that funky thing I played with last week that combined elements of CAPs, floats, stalls, and extensions? Well I put it into wallplane and found that just like it's wheelplane cousin, it opens up the doors to lots of transitions to wallplane CAPs, antispins, plane-shifts, and more. This pattern is reminding me more and more of Charlie's concept of totipotent patterns that can switch between timing and direction combinations.

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An idea I was playing with on the long road home from Africa--contact juggling frequently makes use of transfers between points of the body. I tried finding similar transfers with contact poi utilizing the extra variable of the momentum of the tether and this was the simplest example I could find. It's essentially a transfer between forearms and hand cradles accomplished by treating the handle of the poi as if it is a pendulum going back and forth.

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While I was in Africa, I started playing with a funky pattern wherein one makes like they're going to do a CAP after 3/4 of an extension circle only to use the antispin petal as a stall and pull back out of it into a float. Putting it together with both hands results in a pattern that has some CAP-like qualities but ends in each hand and poi head being pointed straight out from center, opening up some interesting possibilities for transitions.

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In his "Red Pants" video, Mel demonstrated a trick wherein he alternated hands performing pendulum and top stalls to create a cool pattern that switches between the relationship of hands to each other and poi to each other. Erik reminded me of this trick before I left for the playa and we spent a whole afternoon messing with it at Vulcantown during Burning Man. We added floats, isolated pendulums, plane shifts, and more to it. Here are all the variants I can remember.

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