Last week I flew down to Florida for a couple days and had the opportunity to test out a theory I've held for a long time about travel with fire tools. Years ago when I was flying home from Burning Man, a pair of my fire staves was confiscated from me as I boarded my flight at the Reno airport to come home. I'd checked in late and as such, my bag was being manually taken to the plane rather than going through the usual steps and by the time it arrived at the aircraft, they'd taken the staves off of it.

A couple months ago I was sent a request for more intermediate-level tutorials via Facebook and I had kind of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I knew I could provide the content, but I also knew that I considered intermediate spinning to have slightly different qualities than the person requesting the tutorials may have had in mind. To me, intermediates begin seeing poi as being composed of smaller and more fundamental pieces of movement.

The Playpoi website tipped me off on this--a ten minute compilation of some of the greatest and most influential performers and videos in the history of our art. Give it a look-see for a smattering of the best our art has to offer :)

(for added fun, click on the Closed Caption link in the bottom bar to get the name of each video and the artist in it as it pops up)

The fall festival season is upon us! Here's all the festivals I'm confirmed to be attending and/or teaching at this fall:

8/3-5: Spark Fire and Flow Retreat, Chillicothe, IL
8/17-20: August Wildfire, Ashford, CT
8/27-9/3: Burning Man, Gerlach, NV
9/4-6: Lake Tahoe Flow Arts Festival, Kings Beach, CA

The festival season is about to begin! Here's my schedule as it currently stands--check and see if I'm coming to your neck of the woods :)

April 13-15: FLAME Festival - Atlanta, GA
April 27-29: IgNight Festival - Los Angeles, CA
May 11-13: Kinetic Fire Festival - College Corner, OH
May 18-20: Spring Wildfire - Ashford, CT

I got inspired to write this today...hopefully you all don't think it's too preachy of me. These are the ideas that inform my own approach to spinning and I think they bear sharing:

1. Learn at least a little bit of everything, even if you think it's silly. Especially if you think it's silly. I can just about guarantee that the technique you think looks sloppy and awful today will produce something in a few months that looks like magic to you and you'll have to go back and learn the basics anyway.

Took at little while to finalize all the details, but I'm proud to announce my winter 2012 poi workshop tour! In the next three months I'll be visiting, Boston, Springfield (Missouri, not Illinois), and Atlanta!

This past weekend I had the great fortune of collaborating on what I think is one of my favorite projects of the year. I wanted to throw out a little postmortem on the project for folks who may want to understand how it came about and why four tech spinners got together for the utterly insane goal of creating three and a half minutes of choreography in 10 hours over two nights in New York City.

I'll be returning to New York this weekend and will be teaching a new workshop entitled "Exploring Tech Part II" while I'm in town.

This class will be on additional 3D concepts such as plane bending, advanced weaves, and a little bit of toroid flowers. Basically, all the 3D stuff we didn't get to the last time I was in town ;)

Details for the event are below--I hope to see some new and familiar faces this weekend!

I'm excited! I'm teaching my first workshop in New York City on November 12 in Manhattan.

I'll be teaching "Exploring Tech"-- a 2-hour workshop on plane-shifting, toroid flowers, and hybrid families that's designed to take spinners on a journey through popular current techniques all the way through to cutting edge ideas to inspire and challenge!