If you're not familiar with Mel, the ubertechy spinner from Russia who exploded onto the scene about four months ago with his "Me and my shadow" video post, you damned well should be. At 20, he's a more accomplished poi spinner than most people I know in their mid-to-late 20's are.

Now he's posted a couple flow videos and they are a treat to behold. This is his performance at the recent Fires Festival and it features some of the most beautiful tech/flow integrations I've seen this side of Alien Jon or Zan.

After a long weekend of moving, I managed to get an hour and a half to focus intensely on some poi running up to Burning Man. Here is the breakdown of what turned out to be one of the best practices I've had in a long time:

The past few weeks in my video blog, I've played with the concept of taking our current understanding of elliptical CAPs and translating them into 3-D shapes. I dubbed the concept "spherical CAPs" but I'm now starting to question if it's either accurate or actually descriptive of the concept. Here's why:

I have a confession to make: I never learned airwraps when I began my journey into poi. It started out as just kind of an embarrassing secret I hoped nobody would ever notice and then I started running into guys who could do things with hyperloops that made me break into a cold sweat and run and hide inside large wooden objects.

While the vast majority of the time I'm spinning, I'm either doing so to improvised sessions by drummers or canned music that's been selected by my fire performance troupe, I frequently find that those rare opportunities when I get to put on my own music for a solo performance are some of my best.

A thread on Home of Poi asking for a definition of CAPs has turned up not just an interesting history of the concept, but the most comprehensive mathematical description I've yet seen of the move. I don't pretend to understand much (or, really most) of the mathematics in this post, but I'm considering it a moral imperative to educate myself and figure out the mathematics of poi (mainly because I suspect it has major implications for concepts like Alien Code and antispin flowers).

Here is Zaltymbunk's description:

I spent a good long time in my poi practice session today playing with the way my body shifts its weight as I spin. Teaching in a dance studio, I'll freely confess I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder due to the fact that poi sits so uncomfortably in the middle of dance, juggling, martial arts, and street performance that alas it seems to be none of these as well.