Another in the wrap-up series from IgNight. This is a BTB 1.5-like move that Thomas "Nevisoul" Johannson came up with that had a lot of appreciators. Like Keith's move, this one isn't hugely difficult but has a lovely elegance to it that I appreciate.
A fun move Keith Marshall came up with at IgNight--simple and yet quite elegant. The essential elements are to take vertically displaced hands working in split-opposites and use an extension and float to suggest a moment of split-time same direction before dropping the previously top hand via float into a static spin down below. Ronan, Thomas, and I all totally swooned for this when Keith came up with it.
Capping off our series on tangles with the baddest tangle of them all: the orbital! If you haven't already, check out last week's tutorial on hyperloops because it'll be REALLY important this week (http://youtu.be/XB_Jjh70FDs).
This comes from a FLAME challenge: Gina McGrath wanted to see a pentagram vs 2-petal inspin hybrid and Mike Parisi was the first to come up with a solution. I at first thought it was cheating because the hands oscillated between split and same time opposites but then realized what was actually happening was that both the patterns were completing simultaneously. Because the pentagram is a 1.5 downbeat move, it forces the pattern into this type of polyrhythm hand use. That set up a whole lot of exploration for different approaches to polyrhythms.
This is one of those really obvious a ha moments I can't believe I didn't catch onto earlier: most of the transitions out of triquetra vs pendulum I've played with thus far have been at either the top, bottom, or side positions of the move. But if you attempt a transition at 45 degrees off of the top position, the poi heads are in the perfect position for a quarter-time transition! Here are three patterns that make use of this phenomenon.
Last week we talked about air wraps and this week we're going to take that same idea and apply it to moving across the body. This is a concept known as a hyperloop and while it takes quite a bit of work to get to, it's a great stepping stone to getting to orbitals.
The follow-up to my vid on Zan's diamond in all the different timing and direction combinations and polyrhythm hybrids. Here I demo all the monorhythm/even beat hybrids for Zan's diamond and discuss third-order CAPs, including the S-CAP and how it can work inside the Zan's diamond algorithm.
Do all even beat hybrids have an accompanying body tracer? That's the question I posed after playing around with some of the body tracers Ted Petrosky taught in his workshop on the same topic at FLAME Festival. After tweaking one of the tracers he'd taught just slightly, I realized it was very similar to a body tracer I'd learned from Thomas "Nevisoul" Johansson. The original tracer he'd taught me turned out to also function as a 4-petal antispin vs 2-petal inspin hybrid.
A tutorial on the most basic tangle--the air wrap is a tangle in wall plane that immediately untangles itself after two beats. Here are a number of tricks for breaking it down if, like me, the trick was very counter-intuitive to you. Next week we will cover applying some of these lessons to learning hyper loops.
This was one of the last pieces of tech I learned at FLAME and came out of a skill share that happened back at Kinetic Hive after we got back from the festival. It was born out of the idea of combining 1.5s with body tracers and we realized our basic pattern had a lot in common with a 1.5 CAP that Mireneye came up with years ago. Here also are two variants that Ky and myself came up with.
Featuring Kate McCoy! Kate taught an awesome class on fishtails at FLAME Festival near Atlanta, GA and we had some really cool breakthroughs in the course of it. One of which was a combo that utilized triquetra vs pendulum wherein the pendulum is performed with a fishtail pendulum. This made me think of a pendulum vs CAP, which sets you up for an interesting passing move wherein you switch which hand is holding which part of the poi.
The first of a few weeks' worth of tutorials requested by you, my viewers! This first one is on cateyes, which I don't normally think of as a beginner trick, but the standards of such things have definitely changed since I started spinning. Here is the simplest way I know to break down a vertical cateye for all you folks out there who are working on this trick.
Last week as I was working out Zan's diamond with toroids, Kory San made a request for a video on Zan's diamond and its accompanying hybrids. I'm splitting this into two videos: this first one covers the basic algorithms of Zan's diamond as a third-order motion and the polyrhythm hybrids that are available as a result of thinking of each section of the shape as a discrete triquetra. Next week I'll cover some variants that are even-downbeat and thus timing and direction remain consistent throughout.
A commenter on my video about the crosser archer weave reminded me of a move Kate had demoed last year at Kinetic and in one of Noel's videos. I dug it back up to see what it had in common with the move I'd just played with. The answer: very little, but it was still a hell of a fun challenge :)
The second in my transition tools series. This week we're talking about stalls--when you stop the poi's momentum and have the ability to reverse the direction of the poi if you want. Included here is a breakdown of how stalls work. Yay charts! :D
A challenge from Jeffrey Bird on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook--he wanted to see Zan's diamond rendered in opposites split-time in toroids. It took a little bit of doing, but I actually think it's far cleaner than the split-time same direction version I demoed a couple weeks ago. Bonus: I also decided to demo the same-time opposites version of the pattern.
A couple weeks ago Charlie was kind enough to send me one of the prototypes of his new glow poi at Lanternsmith. They don't work like normal glow poi where you have an LED element with a battery at the end of a tether. Instead you charge them up using some high-powered LEDs and they glow in the dark for several minutes before you recharge them again. Here is a demo of the poi in action as well as some thoughts on their use an efficacy.
Part 1 of transition tools--tricks you can use to switch between other tricks! This is on pendulums and 1.5s. Pendulums work by not allowing the poi to complete a circle and because of that they switch direction whenever they reach the height of their arc. One move that makes use of this phenomenon is the 1.5 beat weave and in this video I demo both how to learn the 1.5 beat weave and how to use it to switch to other moves.
A couple years ago when I was traveling through Africa, my host wrote a computer program for me that worked both as a poi simulator as well as a mathematical tool for measuring the distance a poi head travels in each hypo and epitrochoid pattern I could dream up at the time. After comparing a lot of the numbers the program created, it turns out there are some really fascinating harmonic relationships that emerge when you combine moves that normally wouldn't go together as a result of a lack of alignment with either the poi heads or hands.
Starting with a crosser that unwraps and rewraps via antispin and extension, this trick involves essentially freezing one of the hands on the non-native shoulder to force the other hand to do all the work. In keeping the timing and direction consistent, the result is a body tracer that actually cycles through different positions of an archer weave.
Taking threads from the past three weeks worth of videos: how to chain together the forwards weave, reverse weave, windmill, and weave turn together into a fountain variant that has some body tracer elements. This move can be done either inspin or antispin and sets up a lot of great moves down the line.
A few months ago, I did a video on single-hand wraps (called shotguns) in split-time same direction and same time same direction. I didn't show off split opposites at the time because I didn't know how to make it work, but now I do. The trick is you don't actually complete one of the shotguns! These become more stalls than shotguns, but they still have the intended effect.
Windmills are a fun variant on two-beat weaves that you do around your head. They're great for level-changing among other things. He's the best technique I know for learning them--it also gives you some of the basic motor skills that go into a lot of other moves around the head.
Based upon a move in the last Timmehtek video--a nifty switch to quarter time that makes use of a horizontal body tracer. It reminds me a bit of Mel's horizontal SNES move from last week and made me realize that as tech spinners when we tend to plane-break away from the body we have another option open to us. We avoid breaking toward the body for obvious reasons, but integrating this type of transition with a body tracer can have a really cool effect.
This is a tutorial on how to take some of the tricks we used last week in creating our forwards 3-beat weave and apply them to learning the same trick in reverse. As an added bonus, included are steps to learning how to turn between forwards and reverse 3-beat weaves. A friend of mine had pointed out that frequently the reverse 3-beat can be as difficult to learn as the forwards one because one has to switch around the arrangement of pieces in a way that seems almost upside-down.
I got a request a few months ago for a tutorial on this trick--it's basically a 4-beat corkscrew with some elements of body tracing thrown in for good measure. Not too terribly difficult when you break it into component bits, but it involves the body in ways that are hella cool to watch.
When I first saw people doing this, I totally thought this was one of those tricks I'd just let pass me by. Then Kate put out her video of epic awesomeness and I decided I had to add this one to my arsenal. This is an epically difficult move, be forewarned!
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.
There have to be a million tutorials on how to do this move, but this past weekend in Atlanta I had a breakthrough teaching a student that I wanted to share with you all. I really hate teaching the 3-beat weave because I think that for a "beginner" move it's quite complex and really requires a large amount of physical coordination. Nevertheless, here are two approaches to learning it that I've found to be effective. Incidentally, I'm sorry about the poor focus--I didn't realize there was an issue till I'd gotten the footage home to edit :-P
Here's a move that came out of a skill exchange I had over the weekend with Charles Hinton in Atlanta. He showed me a nifty pendulum-based move that was designed to teach BTB air wraps. I didn't have a lot of luck with the pattern as he'd laid it out, but I decided to work out a different approach to air wraps behind the back and have had some limited successes.
I'm wrapping up the poi flower series with this vid on antispin. Antispin could really be its own video series entirely, so I'm just giving a couple different approaches to creating antispin petals in this video and letting people take the exercises used in the previous videos in this series to extrapolate the different timing and direction combinations. If you'd like to see a full series on antispin, please let me know!
Something a little different: I've been trying to come up with some bite-sized chunks of how my work in modern dance has been informing my poi spinning these past few months and here's a small but easy to learn bit that involves teaching your body core to move around in a circle in a way that interacts with your arms in very interesting ways.
A follow-up to last weeks video on the triangle third-order antibrid. I started modeling the shapes that are generated by putting various third-order motions over antispin flowers and came up with some intriguing results. Here are third-order antibrids for cateye, triquetra, 4-petal antispin, and an inspin version of the triquetra one.
This week we're following on the heels of last week's lesson on split-time same direction flowers with some split-time opposite flowers. The good news is that if you got the split-time same direction flower down, this one is considerably easier.
This is something I saw Alien Jon demo when I was home in Colorado for the holidays--it combines third order motions (fractal flowers) with traditional flowers to create antibrids that move through space. Damien would call these antispin/antispin movements and I believe Mel, Poiboi, and a few others have demonstrated similar moves.
A follow-up from the toroid H concept from a couple weeks ago. This takes the same concept, but makes the toroid a ball instead of planet mode toroid and creates a cool stalling pattern out of it. Short but sweet--it's cold out there!
This week we're tackling the Mt. Everest of inspin flowers: split time same direction. We'll use a similar approach to building this flower that we have in the other videos, but split-time variants require a bit more kinesthetic difficulty than any of the same time variations, so the road there is likely to be a little bit longer and take a bit more work. Next week: split-time opposites!
This is a challenge that comes courtesy Dave "Honeybear" Foregger. While I was in Boston, he showed me a pentagram vs pentagram hybrid he'd been working on and it set my gears turning. It's a similar challenge to triangle vs triquetra, but the trochoid pentagram must travel much faster to stay in phase with the plane-bent variant, so synchronizing their movements can be a pain. This is also a great use of crane position done in different orientations.
I didn't realize until I saw Noel's video on the stall combo out of triquetra vs pendulum last week that this move was actually one of those transition spots for a hybrid family and it opened up a whole bunch of moves all at once. Here are two hybrids, a stack, an antispin flower, and Noel's cool stalling move that all overlap on that position. The more of these hybrid families get isolated, we can treat them almost like a circle of fifths to move between different hybrid groups.
Last week we covered how to train your muscle memory for proper petal placement in 4-petal inspin flowers. This week we're covering how to then perform 4-petal inspin flowers with both hands in same time same direction and same time opposites. The procedure here is very similar to the one we used last week, but we will have to resort to a couple tricks to achieve proper poi and hand placement.
This is a move I cribbed from a recent Timmehtek that was one of those very eloquent movements that instantly made me go "why didn't I think of that?" Here are a few transitions out of it that I'm digging on. Noel published a video of his own a couple days ago that plays with some very similar moments--each of these transitions would work for any of those moves as well.
In an attempt to take some elements of snaking into a vertical place, I stumbled into a pattern that seemed to make use of both negative space framing as well as creating some lovely moments of isolation. I had a hard time figuring out how to do it on the opposite side of my body (hence re-recording this tech blog), but the results make for a very satisfying fusion of body tracer, negative space, and fountain.
This is the first time I've spun when I've spent as much time thinking about what my feet are doing as I did about what my poi were doing. I had a really epic flow session leading up to this and there's some laughably bad moments, but overall I feel like this is just as interesting to watch as some of my techier videos but in a very different sort of way.
The experiment continues! This is a series on how to do poi flowers. This week we're starting with basic inspin flower petal placement--how to train your body to find the four compass points of a 4-petal inspin and how to create both 2-petal and 4-petal flowers. Next week we'll talk about how to use both hands to create flowers together.
Some more fun toroid action based upon last week's work. It dawned on me as I was writing out the description for my video last week that many of the patterns we make with poi come down to creating trochoid derivatives of polygons our hands are nominally tracing out--but what if we used plane-bends to describe these shapes rather than creating the trochoids. Here I take this idea and apply it to Zan's diamond. Interestingly enough it takes a body through both directions of a buzz saw in vertical and horizontal plane.
Posting a week late, I know...but trust me it was recorded on MLK Day. About ten minutes after I'd gotten off a bus coming home from New York, in fact. The tradition lives on if slightly delayed ;)
The final installment of our first beginners series: in this one we'll take what we know about turning and tick-tacks and apply them to turns between wheel and wall plane in all the different timing and direction combinations. Once you've mastered each of these positions, you can easily flow between them as you perform.
This tech blog featuring special guest star Ted Petrosky! We got together for a jam in Brooklyn and he showed me a nifty contact trick that starts with a shotgun-style single hand spiral wrap and it got my gears turning. Here are two fun variants that utilize some other tricks we know and love and that really look cool with this move added in for some extra spice.
This week we go through the basic hip reel turn with our poi in same time, same direction. This teaches a very important concept in poi: when we turn, it appears the direction of poi rotation changes relative to us. Next week we'll go through hip reels in other timing and direction combinations.
I've found that I've been doing a lot more body tracers of late and it's motivated me to try and find transitions for them that integrate with other moves I know well. One such transition that's working out pretty well is horizontal stacks. Here are a couple transitions using vertical body tracers that set up stacks fairly well and as I discovered while filming also then present an opportunity to switch between different body tracers.
Kind of a fun brain/kinesthetic workout that came out of a trick I've seen G and Ronan do wherein they play 4-petal antispin against a static spin to create hybrid moments at either side of the body. I took that same idea to a vertical place to start, and then placed the top position behind the head to add a body tracer flavor to the overall movement. Don't know if it has any good performance applications but it definitely gives the brain something to chew on :)
This is the first entry of an experiment: doing tutorials on very basic level poi tricks for people just starting out. No tech to be found here, but if you've either just picked up your first set of poi or are a rote beginner, you may find something of value in these tutorials. In this first series, we're going to tackle basic hip reel turns. Tune in every Friday for the next three weeks to learn the basics of these types of movement.
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!
While I was in Boulder, Alien Jon and I spent an evening playing around with some movements based around creating right angles with inspin stalls and pendulums. Here are a couple variants we played with and a couple transitions one can use to get in and out of them.
A couple weeks ago, I'd done a tech blog on no-beat (sneaky) throws and a weave that one can perform using them. One of my commenters pointed out that there was a variant I hadn't covered and when I was in New York a couple weeks ago, Ted showed me the component I was missing: each hand has a no-beat throw on the up-beat, so you can actually perform that weave in such a way that every beat but the cross beat becomes a throw. It's hell hard but I think it also looks hell cool :)
Shortest tech blog ever! A fun little variant on the split-time same direction stack I've played with before on this blog. Turns out it has more spaces to insert new movements than I'd really considered before and it leads to a nifty compound stack that reminds me of some stuff I've seen Charlie do.
Last weekend as Ted and I played around in the Dube showroom in Manhattan, he showed me this nifty use for a toss forward over the shoulder. I'd seen Ronan doing this toss on the playa but hadn't yet thought of a good use for it, but Ted pointed out that one could then catch the poi head in cradle and the direction of the handle would continue in the direction to initiate a contact roll down the back of the forearm. The catch for this is exceptionally difficult, but I really like the result. Enjoy! :)
I know this topic has been done to death, but in trying to come up with a way to classify toroids, I came to realize we've barely scratched the surface of them. Here I use the approach of imagining the axes around which we can move the plane of a toroid as being similar to the major axes inside an octahedron and choosing specific axes that are parallel with the arm, hand path, or neither.
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!
A follow-up to last week's poi math video. This one tells us how to determine the size of the hand path for poi when we're graphing out patterns using parametric equations. Includes properties of wavelength and amplitude among other nifty math concepts.
Mischief's Naughty Snow Ball brought some of the very best fire dancers in the East Coast together in the freezing cold to perform for an audience of over 800. Here is Dale Fisher from Baltimore laying down some nasty action with his doubles. Enjoy! :)
Here's an interesting idea inspired by Mel's recent video of his workshop on snakes: I'd noticed that when he was practicing tracing along his arm that it was somewhat reminiscent of a box mode antispin flower that had been somewhat squashed. This reminded me of a concept that had been thrown out on the old Tribe tech poi group: the snake eye. This was a trick wherein you'd take a snake but perform it in antispin, theoretically creating cateyes around your shoulder. While Mel's arm tracer definitely doesn't produce a cateye, it does seem very compatible with snakes. Here's the result.
People frequently reference the math behind poi on many forums and groups, but it can seem a little daunting to folks that don't have that kind of background. Here's an attempt to level the playing field. A lot of this will be review for the more mathematically inclined folks out there, but for those who aren't, hopefully this will give you the Cliff's Notes as to some of the math we use to describe flowers and the like and make it a little bit more digestible. If you like this, please leave me feedback as I've got plans in my mind to do a whole series of these kinds of videos :)
There's been some chat in the past week about zero points and how they differentiate from plane bends and even whether they do so at all. Here's my take on the concept (which, rarely enough for poi seems to be very internally logical ;) and how one can think of plane changing as being something of a sliding scale where on one end the poi stops moving (zero point) and on the other the hand stops moving (orbing).
Last video we rolled through three different approaches to defining CAPs. Here is an alternate approach to breaking down such motions: a couple years ago, Alien Jon introduced me to the idea of spinning composites. Compositing is chaining together increments of poi movement that overlap in hand and poi position to either create repeatable patterns or transition and shift seamlessly between patterns.
The question of what constituted a CAP recently came up both in the Tech Poi and Vulcan Tech Gospel groups on Facebook. Here are what I'd consider to be the three main approaches to describing a CAP--in my next video, I'm going to detail a slightly different approach to this question and some of the cool patterns that come not from trying to classify all the CAPs, but from taking the lessons that learning CAPs provide and applying them to more complex types of motion.
More throws for your consumption--this time a type of toss I've heard both Erik and Ted refer to as a "sneaky toss". It's something like a float throw but performed in such a way that it seems to continue a static or small extension motion, rather than requiring a loop like isolated or overhead tosses. It's an integral component in a type of toss weave I've seen Poiboi do in his videos and a fun sneaky toss switch that G showed me while he was in town. I think his version finished differently, but I like the properties the version I'm doing here has.
Whoa...white balance what? Anys, I've done a lot of videos lately on the concept of the toroid flower, and I wanted to revisit it from a place of flow--that is how toroid flowers can be combined with other types of spinning, specifically the 2D spinning we're more traditionally used to. Outlined here are two methods: plane-bending a toroid into the traditional plane orientation or imagining toroids that overlap on a single point and therefore create a junction to switch from one to another. Happy flowing! :)
There's a question that's been dogging my mind a lot lately when it comes to spinning and more specifically spinning for a living. It's a very simple question that's disarming at first but can lead to a good amount of navel-gazing to answer: why am I doing this? What is it about spinning that makes me want to do it to the exclusion of having a stable day job and the financial security I enjoyed up until so recently? I think I got part of my answer last night.
There was a blink-and-you-might miss it moment in my video on timing and direction in toroid flowers that struck me as I was playing with them earlier today: namely, that toroids are direction agnostic. You can change the direction of the hand as you're performing one and keep the toroid in whatever mode you started in, be it antispin or isolation. This means that it inherits many of the mix-and-match capabilities from staff and clubs that we find with tools that aren't gravity dependent and opens up the field of what we can do with them a lot wider.
This was a fun journey: over the weekend my friend Sean Stogner in New York reminded me of a move Marvin Ong and I had worked on in center camp at Burning Man this past year. It's a variant of the diamond split into two triquetras but each hand is working a different split, so they overlap in a quadrant. After experimenting with switching which hand was doing which split, I realized it was leading toward a third-order motion in which the hands would chase each other while the poi phased between quarter and split-time same direction.
A couple weeks ago, I posted a video of Arashi teaching a class at Firedrums and in it, I was struck by the fact that his "crane" atom had a strong resemblance to together-L in Maiki Nope's breakdown of atomic planes for clubs and poi. If this similarity bears out, it would mean in essence that there are 3 different atomics that can be spun from a variety of angles, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Atomic spinners: how does this gel with the world you play in?
In a follow-up to a video I posted a couple weeks back of playing with triquetra vs pendulum in same time opposites, I realized the transition there that let me hit static vs extension and kind of "unfold" my crossed arms also existed with CAPs if the poi are spinning same time same direction. Here is the transition used both to get from a top-side CAP to bottom and vice-versa.
Seen this article by Farhad Manjoo? It was recently published on Slate and it alleges that Google+ is already on its way out. I was skeptical for a number of reasons and then realized I actually had the data at hand to prove G+ audiences are more engaged than Facebook audiences--by a lot!
Over the weekend, e6 posted an awesome video exploring the toroid flower concept and really cleaning up some of the work with it to the point that the shapes are really reading and finding definition as something unique. It's inspired a lot of experiments this week, but I wanted to start with laying out all the four timing and direction combinations for these types of flowers. You can see Erik's original video here:
Many moons ago I did a video on isolated throws and catches that began moving into the world of behind the back catches, but it wasn't until recently that I was really motivated to practice enough to add this trick solidly to my repertoire. Here are a couple of the tricks I've been using to make this trick more solid.
w00t for the new flowcord! Some of you guys may have noticed that about three months ago I switched up the leashes on my contact poi from the colecord I'd been using for more than a year. The reason was I dropped by the Flowspace in Berkeley, California after Burning Man and Sean and I spent an afternoon figuring out how to make this awesome new type of cord they had work with my contact poi. I'm pleased to announce those experiments were successful and now you can buy kits to create these leashes and handles straight from Flowtoys themselves!
This is a trick that Cyrille and Poiboi have both made use of a lot that I'm a big fan of--it's a pair of inner arm rolls performed such that the arms start spread out and then come together to perform the catch. As I worked through this, my original conception of the trick was to have the planes of the handles and tether flush with the back of my arm, but I realized as I played with it that instead the planes had to be at a slightly oblique angle as the direction of the head follows the angle of the tether in contact.
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!
So...roll call, how many of us interested in QFT have ever bothered to watch Charlie's videos on the topic all the way through? The one on notation clocks in at an astounding 45 minutes and I'll confess that even though I've been working on the notation system with him for nearly a year, I've never watched the video all the way through. 45 minutes was just too long a commitment to make for something that didn't showcase any spinning and was all theory and instruction.
The companion video to Tech Blog 200--this one on how to find hybrid families using QFT (poi) notation. I highly recommend watching this in 720 and full screen so you can see all the numbers on the whiteboard. For some background, I highly recommend checking out my blog entry on the basics of QFT here:
A few weeks ago, Arashi asked me to post this video I'd taken of the first seven minutes of his class at Firedrums. My camera was running out of battery at the time, so regrettably I didn't get much more, but you all might appreciate some Arashi tech straight from the horse's mouth :)
At a recent regional burn, a friend watched me as I practiced poi one afternoon and lamented that she believed she had no natural talent for the tool. I chuckled and replied that I didn't either, which I didn't think at the time would be such a controversial position, but it lead to a very heated debate over what constituted talent and how one might be judged to have it.
My assertion then is the same as it is now: when it comes to talent there is no such thing.
I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.
200 tech blogs! This one is on how I've been working to create the hybrid families I've been frequently featuring in my videos over the course of the past year--I have two methods I use these days and this is the more visual one: finding the "lines" of the poi tricks to figure out how to switch between them. Sorry for the weird cuts--I had to get it under 15 minutes :-P
I got the new iPhone yesterday and wanted to test out the camera, so I came to the park to get a little bit of flow on. It may just be the bigger screen but it sure seems to be giving my flip a run for its money :)
G stopped by DC for a few days last week and was kind enough to spin some fire for the local burner community at a decom hosted by local party promoters 88. Here is his second burn of the night.
An idea from a previous blog I wanted to explore a little bit more: the pendulum stall chasers from a few tech blogs ago included a brief note on using said trick as a transition between horizontal and vertical stacking. Here I explore the transition from the horizontal stack in a little bit more detail, taking my two favorite stacks and figuring out the transitions in and out of them into this pattern.
I've been mapping out hybrids lately that utilize a relationship between the hands and realized I'd been assuming the handle was synonymous with the hands. I then started to think about cases in which the handles could be together but not necessary have the hands together. The first hybrid I played with seemed too easy, so I started doing it with an outer forearm roll and it led both to isolation vs extension and triquetra vs pendulum hybrids.
Over the weekend I started messing around with a slightly different approach to triquetra vs pendulum and found it opened up some transition points I rarely use but found to be really fun to incorporate into my flow. In this case I was playing with triquetra vs pendulum with the hands in opposites same-time and looking to the transition points on either side of the pattern, which can access static vs extension or same time same direction hybrids.
Here's another trick Ronan was showing off on the playa--based in pendulum vs CAP, he was doing a catch with the poi head that would then be used to shift the center of the pattern to either side. Another option was throwing the poi head vertically to enter static vs triquetra. I don't often play with head catching tricks, but these have a really fascinating capacity for shifting an audience's point of attention.
In Tahoe, G showed me this nifty interior stall pattern he'd been playing with that I'd at first thought to be a mere curiosity. It involved searching for transitions where the hands were crossed and so were the poi, but as we continued to play with it, a nifty hybrid pattern came out and later G pointed out that Ronan's triquetra fractal could be used as an intermediary trick. Here are all the transitions we found that week.
Here's a move I demoed in an Odds and Ends video a couple months ago, but was also a huge hit at Burning Man. The idea is to take something that is like a stall chaser and introduce both right angles and pendulum stalls into the mix. This essentially turns the move into a series of stalls done in staggered timing and theoretically also offers a great transition between horizontal stacks and vertical stacks.
A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.
If you live in the DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia area, come take class from me at Contradiction Dance on Thursdays 8-9:30: http://www.contradictiondance.com
Last week at the Tahoe Flow Arts Festival I got to take a nifty class from Ronan on advanced flowers. The class was really centered around creating the kinds of fractal motions that Damien has been referring to as third-order motions and that have a variety of other names. Zan's diamond is one example and it's shown here accompanied by the technique Ronan uses to get there. Even more intriguing were fractal breakdowns for triquetras and box-mode flowers. The triquetra fractal really has my brain running in particular. It's demoed here in 3 different timing and direction combinations.
My second post-BM wrap up. Here's a couple moves I was playing with on the playa. I'm still digging on the hybrid family approach to finding transitions between moves and here are two that jumped out at me as I was playing in center camp. both are triquetra vs. pendulum combos, but one is at unit circle distance and another is with a hand-to-hand relationship. The unit circle distance one incorporates a stacking pattern from a recent tech blog--the combination of which is so delicious I haven't been able to stop playing with it since I found it.
At Burning Man, Noel showed me this nifty combo that included elements of a number of different tricks that have showed up on this blog in the past few months and filled in a couple of the gaps between them in some very creative ways. This combo involves doing a pair of inspin vs antispin stalls that one then transforms into a hybrid before using the resulting alignment to create a horizontal stack. Tricky, but fun!
Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.
At Summer Wildfire this past weekend, Ted showed me a really nifty way to stall a hoop while shoulder hooping I'd never seen before. Normally when I stall, I do so by reaching up under and behind the hoop as it's about to pass by my shoulder and push it back the way it just came. This stall involves taking the hand out of the hoop and trapping it between the body and inside of the upper arm, squeezing it to send it back the other direction.
A poi performance I did at Summer Wildfire. Something a little bit new with some dance and clowning thrown in. I got great responses on it, so I'm going to post it and hope folks enjoy it. Thanks to Mitch for the camera work.
We all know this story...you're at a festival, spin jam, or on an online forum and somebody mentions a trick or concept you've played a lot with. So much so that you have a framework worked out in your head for how to understand that move and how many other moves interlock with it. You speak up and say, "x move is a type of y and here's why!" And so begins a lengthy debate over the nature of the move that can at times get heated. Each person clings to their understanding and points out the logical fallacies in the other approach.
Kris Valles sent me a request a couple months ago for a tutorial on how to do this move out of a Nicky Evers video. It's not terribly hard, but it does teach some nifty body mechanics. It also results in one hell of a shitty night if you get motion sickness from it as I did ;)
Over the weekend, my beloved Flip was stolen from me, so I took it as an opportunity to go try out other cameras in its class to find out which was the best for a poi video blogger to play with. The cameras I compared were the Kodak Playsport (I goofed in the video and referred to it as a Playshare), the Flip HD, and the Sony Bloggie. There's a lot of reviews of these cameras out there, but I thought it would be interesting to approach them from the perspective of a poi spinner rather than the average reviewer.
Last week, a poi spinner by the name of Joe Graff stopped into DC and e6 and I got the chance to hang out and spin with him in Malcolm X Park. He showed off a type of stacking I'd seen in videos but hadn't quite parsed out, but when performed in person realized represented an approach to compounding horizontal stacks that opened the door for switching up the alignments of poi and hand in many of the stacks that we play with.
A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.
This is a little bit of an experiment in interactivity with this vlog. I've played a lot in recent videos with the concept of a hybrid family--a move that will interlock with other moves at a specific or multiple positions. I've take this idea to the point where I can take some of my favorite moves and at each of the 4 compass points be able to transition to a completely different type of move. In this vid I demo triquetra vs pendulum and use it to switch to a point isolation, a windmill, a horizontal stack, and a unit circle hybrid.
By popular request, here is the breakdown of how I do the plane-bendy diagonal thing from my last odds and ends video. It's essentially just a corkscrew with a lockout on either side that has been plane-bent to put the lockouts in a diagonal plane. One of the cool things about this, then, is that it integrates well with another diagonal plane-bending move that Alien Jon demoed in the Arizona Transmission video a couple years ago.
A bunch of random combos I've been working on in the past couple months. The stacking stuff was based upon playing with the idea of leash tracing with the head or hand--something that came out of a move Charlie showed me at Fall WF last year, as well as maintaining right angles in the orientation of the poi to each other. The second stacking combo is very similar to the first, but there's a small difference in the timing that makes the difference between the tracing and actually having a moment where the right angle is seen in full relief.
Part 2 in my series on beginner level inversion and introversion play. Last video we practiced individual elements of these moves and here we combine them together--first by taking any 2 together, then all 3, then a funky fountain variant that utilizes the type that seems like an airwrap or hyperloop. There's plenty more fun down this well, so be sure to check out some of Alien Jon, Ky Lee, Christian, and Baz's videos for more inverted goodness.
I've finally taken the plunge and have begun to attack one of those techniques in the poi world that I've spent the past four years avoiding like the plague: inversions and introversions. I don't fully understand the difference just yet, but having seen some really innovative work come out of this technique in the past few years from Insignia, Charlie, Alien Jon, and Ky I decided it was time to learn :) Here are some very basic elements of these movements to begin drilling that will add up to some more complex patterns in my next video.
This is totally one of those tricks I didn't know if I was ever going to get, but fortunately Leo's recent video on body tracers showed a possible shortcut that worked out beautifully: by treating each side of a behind the back waistwrap as a 2-beat, one can train each hand to do its part of a behind the back crosser. The result needs some cleaning up, but it's a useful shortcut for folks with inflexible shoulders like my own.
A couple weeks ago I started playing with a variant on a stacking move I've seen Mel and Poiboi play with, but changed what I perceived the timing and direction of the pattern to be. The result felt asymmetric and so after learning it on both sides, I set about figuring out how to switch between them using a wallplane flower in antispin. I then realized it fits in well with the hybrid family I demoed a couple tech blogs back and threw in a triquetra vs pendulum for good measure.
Erik (e6) made a request on the Facebook Tech Poi Group for those of us who regularly post tech blogs to post vids of what drills we happen to be playing with these days. Here are three drills that run the gamut of contact to plane-bending.
Part 3 of my Arashi wrap-up series from Firedrums. In this video we talk about creating longer and larger versions of the patterns from the first two videos by using cateyes instead of static spin circles to keep the patterns from overlapping with one's body.
This tutorial examines body tracers from the vantage point of thinking of them as two-beat weaves that shift position along the body and starts with a couple basic exercises and the theory behind them and moves into a few examples of the technique in action.
Months ago I did a couple tech blogs on toroid flowers, that is flowers that are created by constantly plane-bending the poi around a circular hand path. The resulting corkscrew motion then loops back in upon itself, suggestion a circular tube and hence a toroid. Charlie and Ted had suggested to me that there was an antispin variant on this flower and showed it to me at Fall Wildfire last year. It's come up again both because it means our conception of inspin toroidal flowers was off and because it turns out it's closely related to some of the Arashi-based tech I've played with of late.
Included in this odds and ends collection: a few variants on horizontal pendulum stall stacking and by popular demand some of the Arashi tech I've had on the blog lately rendered with glow so you can see the trails of the poi as they go along. Finally, a nifty hybrid e6 and I worked on this weekend--taking Arashi tech and hybridizing it with trochoid spinning. The result is ultra bizarre, but I think looks really cool.
This is a months old trick I can't believe I haven't done a tech blog on yet. It came out of Alien Jon, Charlie, and I playing with body tracers when AJ and Charlie were in town back in April. The algorithm for going through this variant on the diamond is a little wonky, but I still think it looks cool. Enjoy! :)
Here's another hybrid family based upon a particular poi orientation--this one being hands together and poi apart. Triquetra vs pendulum, Mel's horizontal stack, point isolation walking, and stall chasers all make use of this alignment. Like the other hybrid families I've demonstrated on this video blog, it's a great tool for transitions.
Here's part two of my wrap-up from Arashi's Firedrums class. This covers how you can use the poi plane and cross points to build polygons rather than using the traditional trochoid method of defining polygon sides with an arc and corners with loops/petals. The implications of this are really cool because they allow you to build polygons that present an image in three dimensions rather than the flat shapes we normally work with.
Here's my first tutorial breaking down some of the tech Arashi laid down in his class at Firedrums. Here we're just dealing with some basic plane-bends that create some nifty diagonal shapes and the concept of using cross points in places we don't normally stick them. You'll see more than a few ideas here that have also popped up in Alien Jon and G vids, so think of this as a basic tutorial on how to start aiming planes as much as we aim flower petals.
Here's a popular viewer request: the 3D flowers that Mel was doing at the end of his "Red Pants" video. These flowers are based in the idea of having the poi spinning in a different plane than the hand and therefore creating a spiral or worm-shaped profile for the viewer. Tank and I played with a similar concept two years ago at Firedrums, but placed the poi plane in wall rather than horizontal plane.
Here's a recap of one of my favorite classes from Firedrums: Keith Marshall's class on negative space. These are two of the tricks we covered that are both cyclical so they're repeatable. The first is relatively simple using a non-native frame and the second can be performed with a contact roll creating a native side frame.
Beginning the process of downloading all the tech from the past three weeks. This is a trick that Asaf (Poiboi) came up with that we used for a lot of our tunneling both at Kinetic and at Firedrums. The idea is to take horizontal cateye vs isolation and utilize some horizontal stacking to switch to the same move on the other side of the body. The spacing works due to that quirk of antispin flowers wherein they put the poi a unit circle distance apart 1/6th of the way around the handpath.
The first minute of this was epic--this latter part is pretty good too, though :) Bliss and Jonny mix up some sweet staff manipulations with some yoga poses and a small dose of what looks like capoeira to me.
The three kids from Loooop perform a partner poi routine Friday night at Wildfire 2011. This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen performed on fire. BTW, I chatted with Tina and Hanna and they are indeed twins ;)
I was a little hesitant to post this since I don't really think it's one of my better spins, but I didn't get a chance to do a tech blog this week, so enjoy this instead :)
If you were are the recent Kinetic Fire Festival or have spoken to either Charlie Cushing or myself face-to-face in the past six months, it's entirely possible you've heard of Charlie's Quantized Field Theory for poi and one of its applications: notation for props. We taught a class together at Kinetic in which Charlie enthusiastically explored the idea with the crowd while I, suffering from a nasty cold and laryngitis, did my best not to collapse and make everybody's day a little dreary.
More random combos I've been playing with--lots of stuff based upon the idea of breaking out of triquetra vs pendulum into various other patterns and back, plus a couple cool horizontal stacks with body tracers based upon some things Charlie, Alien Jon, and I played with back when they were in town and some ideas Ky Lee threw into the mix last weekend. Finally, some one-handed stuff I've been dying to put in a video and couldn't think of a better way to use :)
I realized I had failed to mark a milestone in April and the opportunity came up today to shoot some video. Nothing fancy here--just a single take of tech flow with a hilarious mashup in the background. Here's to 4 years of doing what I love :)
This is an expansion of an idea from a previous video: when you take 3 downbeat flowers and perform them at a 2-poi length handpath, 1/6 of the way around the handpath there is a point where the distance between the intercept for the hand and its reflection across the horizontal axis of the pattern is one poi length. If we vary the combinations and phasing of 3 downbeat patterns, we wind up creating the alignments of all the major unit circle hybrids. Here are 4 examples of how this cool quirk of geometry can be used. Major thanks to Charlie for the help in figuring this one out.
This past weekend I got to host Alien Jon and Charlie here in DC as we geeked out for several days. We thought it would be an excellent opportunity to record a teacher information video for the upcoming Kinetic Fire Festival and here are the results. My apologies for the audio--I desperately need a better mic.
Kinetic will be May 12-15 in Earlville, IL. For tickets and more information, visit http://www.kineticfire.org
More STSD hybridy goodness! This time I'm taking the concept of an 8-step CAP with it a little more literally and utilizing the space created by CAP vs BTH static to take the CAP hand around in an 8-step pattern while maintaining the STSD synchronization with the BTH hand.
Taking a concept I've done and done to death, I wanted to add some out of phase flavoring to it. Taking the idea of the same time same direction hybrid Yuta taught me at Firedrums last year, I'm switching it up so that each hand has a different axis to perform its petals on and working through them in quarters. It's got a nifty quarter-time feel to it even as the poi stay in same time same direction all the way around.
Here is a nifty tunneling round Noel and Jonah from Ohio did on the last night of FLAME Festival. Jonah is rocking out some mini doubles and doing some wicked cool stuff with them. I so wanted to see more of this :)
On the last night of FLAME Festival, Dave Statik, Ky the organizer, and myself got together for this fun tunneling session. I love both Ky's and Statik's styles and wish to hell I'd gotten one of either of their solo spins.
Here's a nice spin Strange Yelle (real name Danielle I believe?) had on Saturday night at the FLAME Festival. I love the parts where she gets really into the music and rocks out :)
This is Noel's first burn on Saturday night at the FLAME Festival in Georgia and it's one of the cleanest sets I've ever seen him do. I'm really glad I was able to capture this one on video :)
Guest-starring Noel Yee from the Vulcan Crew! We spent the weekend in rural Georgia at the inaugural FLAME Festival, tinkering around with stacking and tunneling between workshops. Here, the two of us demonstrate one of the patterns we came up with that involves each person turning with either an inspin or an antispin flower, alternating with pendulums to create a really kickin' interference pattern. Sorry in advance for the audio--we really were trying to project but it was damned windy out!
This one has been rolling around in my head for a long time...trying to make a contact roll one of the beats of a reverse 3-beat weave and it's a doozy. The idea here is to substitute an elbow pit catch and roll where you would normally have the beat under to the other side and instead have your native hand lead the turn back to its own side. Ironically, after woodshedding the hell out of this trick and seeing it on video I think it may not actually be as visually compelling as the amount of work it takes to make it happen. Oh, well :-P
This is something Charlie showed me nearly a year ago and that I hadn't really been working on that hard until recently. Geometrically, it's possible to go through each vertex of an octahedron without repeating any segments and Charlie had created an exercise wherein one does plane-shifts between each of these vertices to define an octahedron via constant 90 degree shifts. Here I demo two of the easier variants in same time same direction, split time same direction, and Charlie's preferred method of quarter-time. Be forewarned: this shit is hard!
Here's an attempt to tie together a whole bunch of different threads from some recent videos both myself and some others have made. First up, e6 posted a video over the weekend about timing and direction where he pointed out the difficulties in making the traditional T&D combinations work with flowers that have an odd number of petals. In an odd bit of synchronicity, Justin Benson posted a video displaying an example of just that--wherein he takes a pentagram into split opposites by creating two pentagrams that reflect each other across a given axis.
A couple weeks ago, Poiboi uploaded a new tech video and as I was watching it, I noticed an element of his style that had escaped me before but presented a good opportunity to woodshed a poi element I rarely use: throws. Specifically, I noticed that Poiboi frequently uses isolated throws to accomplish his timing and direction changes rather than 1.5s or stalls. I've been playing in the past week with doing isolated throws in all the same-time configurations I can think of, both in the same direction and not, plane-shifted, etc. Here are some of the results.
A couple cool ideas based upon triquetra vs pendulum, which kind of fudges the triquetra pattern to create something more akin to two different flowers cut and pasted together. Here I take the same idea and apply it to triquetras and 6-petal antispin flowers to create a new composite and hybridize it both with another triquetra and triquetra's inspin equivalent: 1-petal inspin. Note to self: when recording a video on St. Patrick's Day, do the video before the drinking begins--otherwise I talk a record sped up to double speed :-P
Last week Charlie posted a video to the Facebook Tech Poi Group of an 8-step CAP based in a 2-petal inspin vs 4-petal antispin hybrid. Having encountered this hybrid before when learning same time same direction hybrids from Yuta at last year's Firedrums, I realized that for any hybrid where you combine an inspin and antispin flower that have the same number of downbeats, they will maintain a constant timing and direction all the way around the pattern. Here are three examples in both same time same direction and split time same direction.
Here is a grab-bag of combos inspired by Noel's recent vid on horizontal stacking flow and Poiboi's latest opus to his own form of poi wizardry. Some of these even integrate elements of both styles, but by and large I just had a lot of combo ideas and no idea how to present them. Thankfully it also gave me a perfect opportunity to use a track my friend Conway (Mr. Jennings) dropped on New Year's Eve and has been tickling my ears ever since.
Poiboi and Santiago both have new tech vids out and both feature a wide variety of body contact rolls, so I thought I would demo here two that I've been playing with frequently myself. Both are shoulder rolls that return the poi to native hand and both really utilize horizontal momentum rather than vertical momentum unlike most of the other contact rolls I've demoed here before.
I started playing with this trick earlier in the week...it incorporates elements of the quarter-time floats/stalls that Poiboi and Mel have been using, but drops in and out of a horizontal cateye vs isolation antibrid at each end. I've been sticking pendulum vs CAPs in the same spot and figured I would just skip the middle figure. I like that it has an interesting start-stop dynamic to it.
I ran across a cool performance video of Yuta in the Flowspace last week that reminded me of something I'd begun playing with months ago but hadn't pursued very far: moves that involve wrapping one or both poi around their own hand. I spent a good portion of the weekend playing around with these moves in same time same direction and split time same direction, pulling out some moves I've seen both Ronan and Yuta do in their performances as well as and idea of my own.
Last week I uploaded a tutorial on horizontal cateyes performed in split opposites and got some feedback that the cateyes were looking a little too much like floats, so I've spent a big part of the past week working on cleaning them up both by doing some older tricks I'm a big fan of and trying some newer ones. I used horizontal cateye vs isolation hybrids to check my hand spacing, horizontal cateye vs extension to check my hands' timing and direction, and a pair of triquetras arranged in a Star of David configuration to get a rough idea of what they should look like.
I got a request on my recent video on the horizontal cateye vs CAP hybrid to describe how I was doing a pair of horizontal cateyes that I was using to switch side to side on the aforementioned hybrid. Here they are demoed--essentially they're a pair of cateyes performed in split time opposites and can easily be thought of as being a pair of floats in which then hands and poi heads switch orientation as they go back and forth. It's a little tricky because the planes the cateyes operate in are at a slight angle to each other.
It started out innocently enough...Leo had been playing with ways to stall his hands and poi together at Firedrums and Mel had included a funky move that did the same thing in his seminal "Red Pants" video.
Another trick from Poiboi's latest performance video...this one is by far my favorite. It's a forearm roll where one switches from the inside of the forearm to the outside of the forearm, essentially doubling the area the poi head rolls across. It incorporates elements of what feels to me like a fishtail as well as two forearm rolls I've demoed on here before.
Two more fundamental components of horizontal stacking explored here: the cateye and the point isolation. Neither of these moves is very stable and both require a little big of fudging to line up perfectly with the other poi, but there's still some cool applications for using them both--especially in the last pattern outlined here. Sorry about the uninspired music choice, though...it's nearly 1:30 AM and I just don't feel like digging through my music collection for something else :-P
This will probably wrap up the new tech from the Wesleyan event--this is a move Charlie dropped on Saturday that I thought looked really cool. This is a CAP vs cateye hybrid performed in such a way that each hand performs a single beat simultaneously, such that it takes two cateyes to equal one CAP. Charlie's version is more of a linear extension, which fits well into things like an 8-step CAP or Zan's diamond. Here it is demoed as more of a cateye, which fits well with a split-opposites antispin flower and a nifty transition using split opposites cateyes across the middle.
Another fun trick that came out of the retreat in Connecticut, Charlie on that Saturday night pulled out a fun box-mode move that utilized inspin and antispin stalls to define the corners of the box. I added a V vs. V transition to switch which corner the action was focused on and Charlie suggested using it as a setup for making a horizontal switch. We use this combo to create at 3D composite where we switch positions in the Wesleyan video.
For a while now I've been wanting to use my video blog to document elements of fire culture as I travel and meet people. This is my first attempt to do so: last weekend I went up to Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT for their Prometheus Club's Winter Fire Arts Festival for some epic geekage and workshops. Here are some of the highlights of the weekend as well as a brief interview with the two ladies who made me coming there possible.
I spent the weekend hanging out with some of my very favorite spinners at Wesleyan University's Winter Fire Arts Festival. While there, Insignia suggested to me that I try horizontal stacks in atomic planes and a funky boxing pattern emerged. I realize before long that depending on the type of stack I was doing, that I could then plane shift out of it and resolve to a more familiar move. Thanks for the suggestion, Christian!
It's been a long time since I've uploaded a real flow performance video, so I thought I'd make the MLK Day vid an annual tradition. It is not nearly as warm this January in DC as it was last year, so my hands were pretty icy by the end of this, but overall I'm pretty happy with the results. Some fun tech from the past few months in here and some shivery attempts to add some more body movement into it--enjoy!
A couple months ago I posted a tutorial on plane-changing that was heavily focused on vertical plane-shifts. Lately I've been playing with a couple exercises that have really been helping to nail down the stuff in floor plane and thought I'd share them. Enjoy!
Just an experiment...editing my video instead of doing it as a single take. Please leave feedback and let me know what y'all think of doing it this way. Anys, today on the Poi Theory Group on Facebook, there was a fascinating discussion over horizontal stacking patterns and Leo (leospoi) lent us some of his expertise. He's been thinking of abbreviating the elements of these tricks with single letters to as a mnemonic device to make different combinations. With that in mind, here are three homogeneous patterns, three hybrids, and one possible CAP based upon this breakdown.
This is a trick inspired by Tim Goddard's recent video posting to the Facebook Tech Poi Group. In it, he switches his pendulum and CAP hands using an isolation out of what would otherwise be a spot where you could insert a cateye vs isolated pendulum. In an online chat, we discussed the possibilities of working off the extension rather than antispin to go into isolated split-opposites. The spacing also sets us up to be able to do horizontal cateye vs isolation or just go into any number of isolation-based tricks.
When I was experimenting with timing and direction changes using the quarter-time stall pattern Poiboi used in his holiday performance video, I ran across a way to elevate CAP vs pendulum but got stuck when I realized I didn't have a good way to move it back down to its normal height. After playing with it for a couple weeks, I have a couple different approaches for doing this now--one involves going into a static vs extension hybrid off of the arc of the CAP and the other involves a very tricky iso vs cateye combo off the antispin section of the CAP.
Here's a sequence of moves that Noel and I came up with in Philly that he took some video of. It breaks down to the stall chase to throw sequence Poiboi was doing in his latest performance video, then creating a negative space frame to throw the other poi through and finally utilizing a split-time negative space trick that Noel had been working off with an airwrap to wrap the whole thing up. The two of us performed this trick simultaneously and had a bear of a time getting synchronized.
Sorry about the audio quality! Last week Poiboi uploaded a video of a performance he did in Israel that was pretty kickass and also seemed to be a kind of an update on a performance he did earlier in the year at EJC. One of the changes he did was changing a switch from CAP vs pendulum to quarter-time stalls to CAP vs pendulum going the other way to using quarter-time floats as the transition.
The tradition lives on! Here's my entry for Noel's Christmas poi video thread on the Facebook Tech Poi Group. This is my first time using iMovie '11 for video editing and I have to say I much prefer the old version :-P Oh, well...merry christmas, everyone!
Yet another contact trick from Ted (if you get a chance, definitely take a class from this kid at Wildfire), this one involves a fun reversal on a contact trick I've been playing with for months wherein after trapping the head, one rolls it down the forearm of the arm that catches it rather than across the opposite forearm. This sets you up to be able to do fun reversals where you can flick the poi back using the cradle-to-forearm roll or theoretically roll it across the forearm of the opposite arm to generate a longer contact surface.
For the past month I've been working on updating my previous Python poi simulator to be able to point out the position at which the poi is either fully extended or withdrawn from the hand path (in other words, the positions at which soft, hard, and mixed transitions are available).
In New York I had a funky breakthrough wherein I realized I could stick a horizontal cateye vs iso hybrid on either end of the horizontal stall stacking move Charlie came up with based upon Mel's pattern at Wildfire. Knowing this, I tied together a bunch of threads from the past couple months using moves that all incorporate this hybrid and thus treat it as a transition tool to get between them. Some cool things came out of playing with this.
Spent the weekend hanging out with some of my favorite poi peoples in the New York City area and on Saturday we hung out in Brooklyn right off Myrtle Ave in a small dance space. At one point we took turns grooving to a mix my friend DJ Sequoia put together months ago and Charlie threw out this session. I've known Charlie for a couple years now and without a doubt, this is the most kick-ass flow I've ever seen the kid do.
Continuing with the theme of some fun moves that can be done from the back-to-back triquetra move in wallplane that looks something like a split time same direction antispin flower, here is one that incorporates some elements from tricks that Mel and Poiboi have been playing around with lately: namely when the hands are at opposite ends of the flower top and bottom, you pendulum the top hand and top stall the bottom to align the poi, then reverse this same motion and treat the resulting position as a stall before reversing the direction of the wall plane triquetras.
I've had a rather productive week playing around with tricks that are based in triquetras--here is the first one of a couple: this move is based upon the idea that performing back-to-back triquetras in wall plane can create a transition point to a triquetra vs pendulum hybrid on either side of the pattern by conserving the rotation of the two poi when they brush past each other in the middle of the figure. Takes a little bit of finessing to make it come together, but a really cool transition!
Sorry I've disappeared! Last week was really intense and I didn't have a chance to do a video blog. This is based upon a trick Ted from New York posted in a video a few weeks ago wherein he was switching to iso vs horizontal cateye at each of the side petals of an opposites split-time antispin flower. Continuing with the antispin flower means that the hands have to exit on the opposite side of the unit circle they enter from, so you have to exit after half a turn, or add a half turn to every complete rotation of the trick.
Another one of those funky things that's come out of the Facebook Tech Poi Group: a type of CAP based around an S-shaped handpath. You have to slightly change how you approach the antispin section to put the poi head in the right place. Here I demonstrate a couple patterns that utilize this shape with hands going split opposites. The first one is pretty clean but the second one needs work :-P These also mesh really well with a variant of G's floating triquetra pattern.
On Halloween weekend I got to spend some quality time spinning with some of my favorite spinners on the East Coast. One of them, Baz, came up with this funky move, which I recorded and edited into a video of our fun that day. A few people have asked how it's accomplished--it's essentially a 1.5 weave with a horizontal cateye substituted for a static spin. You can perform this either by having the poi head drop below the other poi head midway through the horizontal cateye, or complete the cateye to keep the move within the unit circle.
Last weekend we were fortunate to have a bunch of folks from out of town who utterly kick ass at their tools to play with. Lots of fun stuff came out of it when we got together for a spin jam on Sunday--here's a couple of the ideas we toyed with. Here we start off with hybrids and try to keep them continuous even as we are throwing one poi around. I'm finding it's easiest to use the poi tracing the smaller circle for this operation. Here we have static vs. extension and iso vs. extension with hands together.
For most of the past year, triquetra has been synonymous with three-petal antispin flowers and in some cases the hybrids that can be created by combining them with other patterns. Nick Woolsey even posted this video, explaining the concept and the term and its significance to poi spinning in general. After doing the math, however, I've come to the conclusion that what we describe as triquetras don't actually match the visual or mathematical properties of triquetras at all and that a couple of the conclusions we've reached based upon this assumption are false.
The day after a massive party that brought dozens of firespinners to DC following the Stewart and Colbert rallies, a few die-hards stuck around for a spin jam at Malcolm X Park in DC. Here is Baz, Ted, Maddy, Erik (e6), and me (Drex) hanging out and spinning in the park till sundown.
Had a chat with Noel on the Facebook Tech Poi group last week about cateye vs pendulum hybrids, more specifically those involving hand orbits rather than head orbits and wanted to try and find a way to perform the former given that I could already do the latter. Here is what came out: the idea is that you're performing two unit circles side-to-side and alternating which hand is performing them as a cateye and which hand is performing them as a pendulum.
Christian posted a challenge on the Facebook Tech Poi group this past week asking for CAP vs cateye hybrid possibilities. Never one to back down from a challenge, I started working through it. I'll admit I haven't found anything yet that I feel is really that aesthetically pleasing, but here's what came out nonetheless.
Wow...I was super exhausted when I recorded this and it came out really sloppy. Hopefully y'all will forgive me for this :-P Anys, over the weekend in an effort to expand my vocabulary in horizontal plane, I tried adapting one of my favorite moves in vertical plane: back-to-back triquetras, and stick it into horizontal plane. Here are four variants: the first is just to take the move exactly as it is and bring the hands together near the head as you're switching back to the original position. Watch out! It's REALLY easy to club yourself in the head with this move.
Just a funky pattern I played around with Sunday with Erik that it turns out yields some cool looking tunneling/composites. I took some video of the two of us doing the pattern together that I'll hopefully get posted in the next week. This is just a step-by-step of how the move is done.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Given that Google Wave will be shutting its doors by the end of the year, I wanted to post a document that's long been gestating on it. I wrote up my theory of hard, soft, and mixed transitions in a rough draft form months ago and had shared it with a whole mess of people whose opinion I respect for feedback and clarification.
With only a few days to work on it, I pulled this performance together for Wildfire's Performance Class on Sunday night. There were a couple rough spots, but ultimately I think it was a decent routine for the prep time I had.
Charlie, Ted, Erik, and I took to the practice field Saturday night to break out a few 4 person patterns. It was a bear and a half to get them synchronized, but when we got them they looked positively amazing.
One of those utter WTF moments when someone shows you something that blows your mind. Ted figured out a bunch of contact moves for buugeng. I can't wait to see him string a bunch of these together.
This is Charlie busting it out on Saturday night at Fall Wildfire. There's totally some tech here I barely understand (despite his best efforts to teach me ;). Overall a really kickass exploration of poi.
This is Ted spinning on Saturday night out in the practice field at Fall Wildfire. Some great flow and great tech--I really loved watching him spin this weekend.
If you came to my class on hard, soft, and mixed transitions at Fall Wildfire, I promised I'd put a digital copy of the handout on my website and I'm a man of my word. Here is both the outline in math and in practice of what constitutes these transitions as well as the "cheat sheet" that maps out the transitions between common hand path sizes and their accompanying shapes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After the temple burn at Burning Man 2010, a bunch of the firespinners on the playa congregated at Hookahdome for one last firejam. Here I am doing what I think was actually my last spin of the week and personally I think the exhaustion is showing a bit. I'm glad I got a spin on video, though--enjoy!
After the temple burn at Burning Man 2010, a bunch of the firespinners on the playa congregated at Hookahdome for one last firejam. Here is my favorite Aussie spinner, Adam Herscheid, breaking out some poi to wow the crowd.
After the temple burn at Burning Man 2010, a bunch of the firespinners on the playa congregated at Hookahdome for one last firejam. Here is Burning Dan wowing the crowd.
After the temple burn at Burning Man 2010, a couple impromptu spin jams broke out. Here is G spinning near a beautiful sculpture just north of the temple.
This week begins a new session of poi classes at Contradiction Dance in Silver Spring. I have to admit that as a teacher I was spoiled rotten by the kids I taught in Kenya, whose focus and discipline was incredibly inspiring. Fortunately, the first class we had last night was just as inspiring! This session in addition to focusing on plane control and adding to our catalog of tricks like normal, I've added partner poi to the syllabus. Partner poi has seen some huge advances in the past year and presents some unique and interesting challenges for us.
After the temple burn at Burning Man 2010, a bunch of the firespinners on the playa congregated at Hookahdome for one last firejam. Here's Conway Jennings spinning to the tunes.
Uploading videos here in Africa has proven to be such a production that I think this might be the last one I get to upload before coming home, but keep an eye out just in case I change my mind ;) Here are two methods for switching which hand is performing CAP and which hand is performing pendulum in the CAP vs pendulum antibrid I've been working to death lately. The first method switches both moves to isolated pendulums and when the orientation of the hands is reversed, we return to the original move.
After having been spending a lot of time trying to get the basic contact poi moves down, I went back and viewed a couple of Poiboi's old tech blogs and realized that a lot of the contact moves he demoed in them made a lot more sense, so I went back to learn them and found there are a couple interesting transitions using these basic contact moves that actually look pretty neat! One is demoed here: you switch from static vs. extension to pendulum vs. CAP using the forearm roll where one catches the poi on the opposite arm before flicking it to roll along the original forearm.
I made a stop this past weekend at Nairobi National Park just outside the city to take in some wildlife and untouched African wilderness and it gave me the perfect opportunity to record a video! I know I've been doing a lot with pendulum vs CAP lately and I probably will keep on doing so because what I'm finding is so much fun! Here I've been working to put together a point isolation with a pendulum to create the illusion of the two poi moving together like a single line.
So if I've uploaded the right video (the computer I'm currently on won't view mp4 videos, so I'm making a guess at which video on the camera is the right one), you should all be seeing a transition from a cross-shaped plane shift to CAP vs. pendulum utilizing essentially an inverted linear isolation and a isolated pendulum to line the poi up the proper way to go into pendulum vs. CAP and back. Really, though, it was just an excuse to shoot a tech blog my first few days here in Kenya. Enjoy! :)
It's Friday afternoon in Mombasa. I surface in the Indian Ocean just off Nyali Beach, North of the city. The weather could not be more perfect: lazy clouds hang at the edges of the horizon as an unobstructed sun shines down on a seemingly endless corridor of white sandy beach. Three British tourists attempt to learn to windsurf several yards further out to see without much luck. Next to me floats Martin, one of the first street children who started working with Will when he created the Motomoto Circus School.
Saturday morning: last night was a magical mystery tour with Sarakasi and James. Today it's the hamlets kids we're going to teach. Will Ruddick has been on a bus from Mombasa all night and arrives before I wake up in the morning. There is a package waiting for us at the Post Office in town--the last pieces from the United States we need for the program. Already we've gotten a 100 foot roll of 2" wide kevlar, 40 high-quality fishing swivels, and 40 quick links. The hardware goes so fast as we build, so though all the numbers seem high, we're still budgeting appropriately.
For just over two weeks we've drilled and run new concepts. We've played with choreo and fine-tuned what we already have. I can teach until I turn blue in the face, but ultimately what will prove the mettle for any performer is a big crowd and all the crazy uncertainty it brings. It can turn shy, introverted wallflowers into dynamic giants or leave outgoing extroverts weeping in embarrassment. Ultimately, you never know entirely who you are as a performer until you hit that stage.
Every teacher knows their job is not just as simple as telling their students what to do and leaving it at that (or at least, all good teachers do). On one level you have to keep those students who are zipping ahead of the class engaged while making sure that those who just aren't getting it don't get left too far behind.
Hello, all! I'm writing to you from the wilds of Kenya...well, okay...an apartment on Ngong Road in Nairobi, but I swear the wilds are merely an hour's drive away.
Dovetailing both on Noel's interesting take on using isolated pendulums in the pendulum vs CAP hybrid and Ronan's pendulum vs cateye transition using the same pattern, there are patches on either side of this pattern wherein we can enter an iso vs horizontal cateye with minimal effort and the results look damned interesting. One can do this hybrid on each side, but the timing switches to come back to the original pattern are difficult to keep track of.
I started out by trying to figure out how to integrate G-style plane shifts with the ubiquitous triquetra vs pendulum hybrid and realized I'd never played with the other three arrangements of it: pointing the odd petal to either side or down while maintaining the pendulum in the other hand. It led to some odd timings, but did make the plane shifts I'd originally wanted to play with doable. The one with the petal pointed down also seems to integrate well with the same time same direction moves Yuta was showing me at Firedrums. Cool stuff!
First up, a short recap of the last video as the audio was of awful quality. Next up, a couple additional variations on the pulseweave concept performed with the poi in opposites or as a 1.5. The opposites one seems to yield line extensions on one side and linear isolations on the other. As for the 1.5s, given that there are four distinct positions each hand can occupy in the course of this move, it also means that there are a possible 16 different combinations for how this move can be performed (both pendulums forward, both pendulums back, one forward and one back, etc).
Sorry about the audio! Earlier this week, Alien Jon posted a video on a concept he was calling pulseweaves--an intersection between linear extensions and 3-beat weaves. Based upon his idea, I've been playing with a fountain that utilizes the grid we're familiar with playing with from elliptical CAPs. It has a funky side-effect in that moving around it antispin results in extensions in the middle, but moving around it inspin results in antispin petals in the middle.
Okay, I'm really torn on this one having seen the video now. The flower described to me as antispin in the comments section of the last video had an upbeat between two petals and downbeat between two other petals. What I'm performing here is the first geometry I could find that conformed to the shape, but watching it now I think it's just a 2-beat corkscrew performed as a floor-plane flower. The "spiral" based flowers I played with before all had the motion of the poi head oriented at all times on a plane perpendicular to the orientation of the hand.
Having played a little bit more with the concept of toroidal flowers I looked at in #100, I'm beginning to believe that they may lack a distinction between antispin and inspin variants. Specifically, it seems that no matter how I orient the rotation of the poi head to my hand as I turn with them, it results in the same number of downbeats and thus I'm pretty sure the same distance traveled by the poi head.
This past weekend at the PEX Summer Festival, Noel showed me this bitchin' pattern wherein one uses an isolated pendulum on the end of a pendulum vs. CAP antibrid to switch the orientation of the hand to poi lineup. This opens the door for some switches into hybrids, some point isolation switches, and even an inverted pattern based upon one that Charlie was playing with at Wildfire. There's more patterns to be found in here!
If you live in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and haven't heard of PEX, you owe it to yourself to check them out at some point. It's essentially a collective of creatives who live and operate out of Philly and throw some of the most amazing Burning Man inspired parties you'll ever see. Last year they started an event that is a hybrid of a music festival and a burn that takes place in Northern Maryland over the 4th of July weekend and I was delighted to return to it this year.
Hooray! Lucky number 100! There have been some awesome tricks and some awful ones...some weeks when I had no idea what to post and some when I physically couldn't record enough video for all the ideas I had. Through it all I really have appreciated all the support and encouragement from the larger community out there. Thanks so much for tuning in, challenging me, learning, and teaching me!
I've got to confess that as much as partner poi has blown up over the course of the past year, I've yet to really see much of the appeal of it. Like degrees of twist, there comes to be a point where the more intricate the movements involved in it, the less graceful and more unnatural it comes off (and therefore, to my mind, the less entertaining to an uninitiated audience).
A bit of tech I started playing with at Firedrums that I'd totally forgotten about. After taking Ronan's Constructs class at FD, I started playing with a few of the patterns to see what hybrids were accessible from soft transitions out of the "constructs" he showed off. Here are the first two I found--both are iso vs. horizontal cateye antibrids that come out of pendulum hybrids performed a unit circle distance apart. I tried the first move in the latest Vulcan tech blog, but it was messy as hell. Here's what it looks like cleaned up.
The summer session has begun at Contradiction Dance! If you'd like to hone your skills, get back up to speed, or pick up a set of poi for the first time, come join us at 925 Wayne Ave in Silver Spring, MD on Thursdays from 8-9:30 PM.
Lately I've been pushing exercises to solidify plane control in class as I'm noticing this is a frequent stumbling block for folks trying to get into more advanced technique. We're also playing with the wide, woolly world of 1.5s which for my money are the best way to switch between different combinations of timing and direction.
Another one of those poi avenues that I've either barely touched or just haven't bothered to polish since I started playing with it: contact poi! In this case I've been working on the subtype wherein you're treating the poi head like a contact juggling ball. I'm totally awful at contact juggling (though learning), but I'm still trying to work through this related type of manipulation. Here are four manipulations that Elemensce helped me through at Wildfire and the tips that made them work.
I've spent a big portion of the past week trying to polish my plane shifts from antispin flowers to horizontal plane antispins and I wanted to share a couple of the drills I've been doing to get there. Mostly I've been taking same-time opposites flowers and plane shifting out of the sideways stalls and then executing a 90 degree turn. Being as how there are two directions of same time opposites antispin flowers to work with, the big mind-bender I've been working on this past week is switching between these two types with every turn.
This puts together a few threads that came out of Firedrums and Wildfire. It's basically just a couple different approaches to switching which hand is performing pendulum and which is performing triquetra in a hybrid. We can use either 1.5 stacking or a lockout to get us there--or both if we so choose!
At Wildfire I got a good chance to run my transition theory through the ringer and I got some great feedback from some folks I really respected about it. One of the more fun collaborations was Sunday with Charlie and Justin. Charlie and I essentially hadn't slept and spent most of the day working out the theoretical framework in which hard, soft, and mixed transitions could be applied to plane bending and shifting. We came up with a couple new moves neither of us had ever seen before and laid the foundation for what I hope will be a really nifty expansion of the theory. Thanks, guys! :)
Another set of ideas that came out of geeking at Wildfire with Noel and Charlie: this time using point isolations matched up with pendulum stalls to create a fascinating isolation effect when switching from side to side with pendulums. We also found the same movement rendered a unit circle apart yields a funky S-curve that could be used for timing and direction changes with the pendulums. Fun! :)
This weekend at Wildfire included a whole slew of point-isolating moves from Noel. One of which was an interesting 1.5 pattern that I tried to learn and this is what came out. Charlie thinks it's different than what Noel was doing, but unfortunately I didn't get it on camera so I've no way to be sure. Either way, however, here it is: a reverse 1.5 with unit circle spacing that uses poi head/hand contact to switch into a stacking move on each side.
Noel and Jordan from the Vulcan crew bust out some partner poi, including composites, partner weaves, and partner flowers Saturday night at Spring Wildfire 2010.
I've been playing some more with the same time same direction patterns Yuta was showing off at Firedrums and trying to apply the concept to stacking patterns. While technically none of these are true stacks, they share some similarities in concept in how the hands change orientation in relation to each other. Going a bit down the rabbit-hole, here is a pattern that essentially amounts to performing a stack in all four directions and alternating between an antispin and extension transition to do it.
The last day at Firedrums, Alien Jon, Yuta, and I were playing with a pattern I could not for the life of me get: it's a switch that Ronan does between adjacent pendulum vs. CAP hybrids using a move in the middle I couldn't make out (he does it at 3:09 of his BJC performance video). After a couple weeks of futzing with it, I found the solution quite on accident--the middle move is cateye vs pendulum, a bizarre hybrid Ronan taught in one of his classes at Firedrums.
This blog is going to be on something a little different: hardware. For most of the past year I've used rubber feet as the handles for my fire poi with some form of string connecting them to the swivels in my chains. It's worked pretty well, but I've been worried about the strings I started with (shoe laces) breaking or catching on fire, so I tried using colecord instead. While the colecord was ridiculously comfortable, it's also the least resilient material I've used thus far. After only a month and a half, my current cords are already fraying.
I had a lot of footage from Firedrums that I couldn't get into the video I made last week, so I'm going to post a couple of the things that wound up on the editing room floor this week. Here is Alien Jon teaching a crowd of eager onlookers (including myself) how to create 6-petal antispin flowers out of pieces we're familiar with from box and diamond mode antispin flowers.
Here is a video retrospective of Firedrums this year featuring some of my favorite artists: Marvin, Yuta, Annetta, Valery, Adam, Kate, Noel, Memory, Bliss, Tash, Brecken, Thomas, Fyn, and many many more. Hopefully the utter thrill and joy of this event comes across here. Sorry for its tardiness--I had tried to edit it as a tech blog but found it worked infinitely better this way.
As I've played around with my soft and hard transition ideas, I've found it helpful to move around the hand and poi paths of some popular moves in Illustrator and other graphics editing programs, but my technique for doing so has left a lot to be desired. Essentially, I've been putting the proper variables into an online spirograph program (located at http://wordsmith.org/anu/java/spirograph.html and mirrored below), taking a screencapture of the result, and importing it into Illustrator using the livetrace function.
Another move from this year's Firedrums. Kate from Florida came up with this one, that takes the old stall chase exercise and adds a twist to it by switching between the stall chase and a split-time opposites stall. It reminds me a bit of another variant on the stall chasing that Mel does, but has a rather unique flair that I dig. Enjoy! :)
My last day at Firedrums I got in a one-on-one geeking session with Yuta and he showed me this lovely number. It's funky because it utilizes a type of spinning that we usually train ourselves out of very early on as poi spinners--same time same direction. Yuta's been playing with using this to create funky hybrid flowers similar to the type that Cyrille does with split-time same direction. This also evidently is where the static spin BTH vs CAP hybrid comes from. Enjoy!
I'm back from Firedrums and managed to get a lot of footage of the event, though not nearly all the footage that I wanted to capture. One of the classes I really enjoyed was Russ's class on hybrids, though I think the patterns he taught us were actually much closer to being CAPs. Here are the patterns from that class--enjoy! :)
Yuta lights up at the first night of Firedrums 2010. A few guests pop by for some fun, but all told it's a pretty clean shot of him from start to finish.
Not the best angle, but also not bad given how much the crowd was moving. This was Ronan's second burn after I made it to the circle Saturday night at Firedrums 2010.
Before I take off for Firedrums for the week, I wanted to post a little tech bit I got the inspiration for last week. We take G's hybrid stall out of the C-CAP as the root of a plane shift into CAPs behind the back and head. Arms are same-time opposites and poi are split-time same direction. Done cleanly I think this would make for a real eye-popping stunt and it sets up perfectly for returning to the original C-CAP in wheel plane.
I thought I would mark the occasion of having been spinning poi for 3 years with some fire, glow, and a flow practice I did on the beach in St. Thomas. :)
Unfortunately I missed the first minute and a half of this as it dawned on me that I should record Yuta's performance as well as sit agape watching it in awe, but I still managed to catch some highlights. This was an awesome routine and I'm really glad I caught any of it.
In a strange bit of zeitgeist, I ran cross the same idea from two different poi spinners who I'm relatively sure had never spoken of the idea between each other this past weekend while I was in San Francisco. When dealing with 4-sided polygons in spinning, as one tends to with antispin flowers, elliptical CAPs, and any 9-square theory items, you wind up with two similar but difficult to transition between patterns: box and diamond mode. If we expand these out to octagonal figures, however, the issues switching between modes diminishes significantly in complexity.
I've spent a bunch of time playing with the CAP vs BTH static spin hybrid this past week and realizing the transitions in and out of it are vastly easier than I thought. In fact, one can make a very cool and clean looking transition from either extension or antispin in the direction of the poi straight into this combo and back out. In particular, I like the way this works with opposites split-time.
A couple months ago I posted a video using plane-bends to switch between inspin and antispin flowers. G saw the vid and suggested I try the same technique in split-time same direction, so here it is! My right side isn't as clean as my left side, but I still think it's a cool effect. Enjoy!
Whoops! I just rewatched my video on vesica piscis soft transitions and realized I'd promised to post the charts I'd used to work through these transitions and never did. Here they are, along with the original video--they depict a series of soft transitions from cateyes to triquetras and vice versa in which the overlap in hand paths between the triquetras resembles the vesica piscis pattern sometimes seen in sacred geometry. Enjoy!
For a large portion of the past year, I've had a massive poi mad-on for technique like Ronan McLoughlin's. He's from Cork, Ireland and has one of the most original poi spinning styles I've ever seen. Unlike most poi spinners (myself included), Ronan centers his style around stopping the momentum of the poi rather than keeping it moving, resulting in a dizzying array of stalls, pendulums, and contact work that always leaves me scratching my head.
Sorry about the audio! The mike on my flipcam isn't great, I'm afraid, but hopefully, the ideas I'm playing with here will still come across. I've been working on a way to make the now-cliche stall chase work in horizontal plane and came up with this approach which utilizes plane shifts to give us a brief moment of the poi angles straight out before one or the other has to stall down. Interestingly enough, it also yields a shape that's compatible with the quarter-time stall chasing patterns I showed off a couple weeks ago.
Christian (Insignia) posted a series of images to his Facebook profile last week detailing a few diagrams wherein a body could transition between triquetras and cateyes in a variety of really fascinating ways. After playing around with the idea for a little while and realizing it featured a geometric concept called a vesica piscis, I worked out where playing with cateyes and triquetras using the concept could take you. Ironically, the shapes are all axially, but not radially symmetric as Christian's diagrams came out.
Nick Woolsey and G posted a video today that featured G doing a crazy kind of hybrid stall I'd never seen before. I got to playing with it and here is a fun pattern that came out of it, switching between CAP patterns with a split buzzsaw flower.
I got a request this past week based upon a mixed transition diagram I'd posted to Facebook for instructions on how to do one of the transitions outlined in it: namely switching from root horizontal cateye to ET vertical cateye. Primarily I'm using gravity to help in this case, but there is a way to snap the poi head vertically to do it as a mixed transition with the hand soft--it's damned hard, though.
Last week PoiBoi07 posted a great vid with some fun triquetra and cateye hybrids performed with the static/isolating hand behind the head. Here is the same hybrid as well as a couple others I've seen that utilize a similar approach, including extensions and C-CAPs.
This weekend comes the fruit of weeks worth of labor: my glowspinning troupe, Revolutionary Motion is performing at Contradiction Dance's spring concert. Featuring some of my favorite local spinners: Surprise, E6, Mia, and Maddy, we've worked up a piece incorporating elements of modern dance and hip hop with our tools and we're stoked to be performing this piece in such a fantastic setting.
If you live in the Baltimore/Washington area, please consider attending. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.
Had an interesting revelation over the weekend: thus far all the work I've done on the concept of transition theory (hard and soft transitions) has been restricted to 2D epi and hypertrochoid shapes. While playing with a mixed transition CAP pattern over the weekend, I suddenly realized I could repeat the pattern without altering its character by switching to the plane behind me. Technically, such a transition means going to an ET relative to wheel plane, but it behaves like an IT due to conservation of angular momentum.
It's been a while since I've broken out the doubles! This past weekend a friend and former student showed me an alternate way to perform a split-time opposites antispin flower with doubles that opened the door to figuring out how a couple friends from Virginia Beach are able to do a 6-petal variant of this same move. Basically: you switching from thumbs leading to pinkies leading. Here is a demo and detailed instructions.
After posting tech blog #71, I realized I could easily take the top stall that was giving me so many problems and use it to transition into the pendulum stall down maneuver I already had down to create kind of a funky waterfall effect. As was pointed out in comments, this move also provides an excellent point of entry for Ronan's pendulum stall stacking move from BJC--that transition is demoed here as well.
DerPoiBenne sent me an inquiry about doing a mixed transition with loop up top and extension down below inverted and it turns out it's doable with a stall. Here it is performed in split opposites such that one segment is antispin flower and the other is extension. I'd originally misunderstood what he was suggesting and did the loop as a major translation/linear isolation, so here is an interesting 4-step pattern using this property as well.
Back in the day, glowsticking.com used to frequently feature videos that edited together footage of many glowstickers into one fabulous vid that showed off the talents of many people all at the same time. Recently, the challenge went up on the Home of Poi forums to put together a similar collaboration vid between many of the spinners on the forums. Ten fantastic poi spinners answered the call and Poiboi edited them all together.
Things have been busy down under! If you're not familiar with Aussie poi auteur Pineapple Pete, you should give a look to this fascinating video from a couple years ago showing off some of his experiments at the "Church of Poi".
For a few weeks I'm going to change my format a little bit and rather than doing a weekly update with all the tricks I've been working on, do updates for individual tricks. It should keep my running time down and mean more frequent updates. Sound off in the comment section and tell me if you like the change or not.
First up, a tip last week from a commenter on this blog gave me a critical piece of the puzzle for the isolated weave. It's not perfect, but it's at least recognizable as what it is now. Next, based upon the concept of doing a plane-bent "asterisk" like G does, at a recent spin jam it was suggested that one could think of the radiating spokes as behaving like the petals in flowers, so here are examples of two timing and direction combinations of this idea.
This week I'm going back and revisiting a couple ideas from the past couple months to follow up on them both to show progress and where some of those ideas have taken me. First up is the isolated weave: I've had some progress on this both by practicing standing isolations in all four individual positions of my arms during the course of the weave and with a helpful piece of advice from Charlie on switching from one side of my body to the other. Next, the CAP vs static BTH hybrid poiboi07 and I had chatted about a couple months ago.
First up, I'm revisiting a trick I posted several weeks ago: PoiRsquared's request to see an opposites crosser to polyrhythm hybrid transition. I hadn't realized the crosser he was describing was actually what I would consider to be a meltdown and had to shelve the move till I learned how to do an opposites meltdown. Well, I've got it now! Included is a step-by-step breakdown of how I got to it and finally, a demo of the transition PoiRsquared originally requested.
After demoing the around the head meltdown last week, I got a comment from one person asking about performing the meltdown as a fountain. While I think that conceptually the two are different enough that a straight-up combination of these moves is not possible, there is a way to perform a similar maneuver by using Alien Jon's concept of body zones. Demoed here are a couple ways to play with this concept. Next up, I'm getting to be relatively happy with my transitions from isolation to lockout, so I'm starting to work through an isolated weave.
I'm back to drilling isolations in hopes of getting down the elusive isolated weave, but shooting for lower hanging fruit in the form of the iso to lockout combination guys like Nevisoul and Ronan have made famous. I'm specifically working on getting the isolated bit in the middle locked into the iso position like they have to make it really pop.
DC finally came out of its deep freeze just in time for a warm MLK Day. I headed down to Dupont Circle for the day to enjoy the sun and do a little free spinning. Enjoy!
Here's the second installment of my explanation of how hard and soft transitions work with Alien Jon's concept of arcs and loops. Here I demo all the permutations of these transitions through the intratangent circles (concentric) versus extratangent circles (outside--btw, if any mathematicians know what these concepts are actually called, please let me know) for a bunch of different circle sizes.
The first installment of a short series of vids on transitions between unit circle patterns, antispin flowers, and extensions. What the common elements are and how to switch between them. Most of this vid is defining basic vocabulary and providing basic examples of the concepts that will be explored in later videos. A major debt for this is owed to Alien Jon, whose concepts of arcs and loops is one of, if not the critical underpinning of these concepts.
Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.
The studio I teach at has moved from Takoma Park to Silver Spring and we're celebrating the move by offering a week of free classes, including poi!
This is a great opportunity for rote beginners to get free instruction to start them on the road to the playful and challenging world of object manipulation. If you've been wanting to learn or have learned only a couple tricks and would like to learn more, this is the perfect chance!
First up, the first hoop trick to make it into my tech blog! My friend Katie/Surprise showed my a funky isolation trick that I dug that seemed to have this odd stopping point. Remembering some bits learned from a recent Hoop Path workshop, I realized a body can keep the hoop constantly in motion by jumping one's grip. The demo here is terrible--it's with my old hoop, which weighs a ton. Nonetheless, I swear this one is doable (incidentally, if any hoopers out there know what it's called, please drop a line in my comment box).
Those of you who've been crusing through here the last couple days have probably noticed the addition of a few items. After Sphericulism went down and then returned, I grabbed a copy of Rev's Manifesto so I could continue to read and be confused by it and a few recent queries from friends for copies of Cyrille's Geometry document from last year, I stuck up copies of both and added a couple other writing on poi theory that I thought kicked ass or that had influenced me a lot. Hopefully in the future I'll be adding additional documents into this section (Charlie's 9-square Theory perhaps?). If you've got a suggestion, hit the contact box and tell me what you'd like to see mirrored here.
Also, I added a rating feature to my videos and blog entries. There's really no great reason for that aside from the fact that I'm curious what people are digging on. Thanks to all the folks who've used this site since it launched a couple months ago. It's nice to have a home and to have people visit you there :)
Here's my entry for MCP's Christmas video thread on Home of Poi. DC got dumped with almost two feet of snow and it provided an excellent opportunity to get a unique view of the monuments on the national mall. It was, however, hella cold that night, so regrettably my spinning was neither as clean nor as fast as I would have liked.
poiboi07 posted another sweet tech blog and I'm cribbing the first trick shamelessly from him. It's a pendulum vs. CAP hybrid that one then uses to perform a Yuta-style horizontal stall around either in a complete circle or 180 degrees. I'm finding it's a fun way to do an almost weave style turn back and forth and have added a vertical stall shift to the mix, making it an easy move to switch around in all three planes.
After working through trying to do a mode change in same direction with Charlie's 9-square theory, I came up with an interesting solution that involves using soft transitions across a unit circle grid to switch between box and diamond mode. The idea for this is centered on isopops from hooping and more specifically how you can change circle size by treating them as adjacent circles rather than dilations of the same circle. Included is a demo of how this technique can be used to switch between iso vs cateye antibrid to static vs triquetra antibrid to iso vs extension and back again.
This past week, Zan posted a great video on diagonal planes that included an exercise that does an amazing job of cleaning up diagonals--seriously, well done :) Playing with diagonals has me thinking about having planes offset by degree differences other than 0, 90 or 180, and here is an example of plane switching between planes at are offset by degrees based in 3 or 5 rather than 4. Next, over the weekend, Chris Rovo showed me a pattern he'd been working on wherein an atomic flower switches to atomic weave and over to another atomic flower.
Over the weekend, Zan posted an excellent tutorial video on diagonal planes, those bizarre bits of techery that came out of EJC this past summer. Zan breaks it down in such a way that it'll help you figure out how to keep your planes straight, some very basic diagonal transitions, and how to execute some pretty mean-looking turns with them. If this stuff intrigues you like it does, me give this vid a gander:
Lots of requests lately for a fire vid, so here's one of me performing at an informal spin jam on Thanksgiving night. Note when I whiff a BTB 5-beat waistwrap and My ubersloppy diagonal plane attempts ;)
This past week, Alien Jon posted a tech blog featuring a funky approach to creating compound circles that bears some similarities to Nick Woolsey's concept of no-beat windmills and how they relate to poi. As I've been playing with it, I've found it's also a funky way to create polyrhythm hybrids.
Times are getting exciting for those of us who love poi blogs: there are two new video blogs in town that I'm all about. First up is an Israeli poi spinner who seems to be taking inspiration in equal parts from both the European school of float/pendulum/contact poi spinning as well as the American unit circle schools of thought to create some of the cleanest technique I've yet seen (read: yes, I'm totally jealous of this guy's form ;). PoiBoi's latest blog can be found below. I highly recommend visiting him on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/poiboi07 and seeing his other vids.
Over the weekend I made a trip up to Pittsburgh to listen to a good friend spin some sick dubstep and while there I got to catch up with a few of my very favorite fire spinners. Here's Chris Rovo throwing out some incendiary tech at the after party.
I'm taking a week off from last week's theory-intensive video to show off a couple tricks I've been playing with in the interrim. First off is a combo: meltdown - under the leg throw - 1.5 - antispin flower - spiral wrap. If you can nail the throw, the rest of it flows together incredibly smoothly. Next, after seeing the videos coming out of Russia from the Antispinners crew, I'm working to make my antispin flowers and stall switches to change direction cleaner.
Over the weekend I made a trip up to Pittsburgh to listen to Mr. Jennings spin some sick dubstep and while there I got to catch up with a few of my very favorite fire spinners. Here's Conway busting out some gorgeous tech poi in the backyard at the after party.
I must have done at least a dozen takes of this video...there are a lot of ideas I wanted to cram in here and kind of sketch out the line of thinking that led me to each of the conclusions outlined here, but it's hard to do that inside of ten minutes. Ultimately if this doesn't make sense, let me know which parts specifically and I'll do my best to clarify in later videos.
Yesterday I wrote about the many holes that had been poked in the theory of hybrid construction I posted a few weeks ago, among which are its incompatibility with any timings other than split-time or same time and the fact that it can't account for a static spin versus extension hybrid. Thus begs the question of how exactly we can define hybrids in a way that is extensible (ie, that works at any size shape we can image).
A couple weeks ago I posted a video conjecturing a new framework for understanding how poi hybrids are constructed--namely that they are examples of poi motion retaining multiple combinations of timing and direction. I've had a couple holes in this theory pointed out to me and I've come to see additional holes myself, so I'm putting together a breakdown of why my theory was flawed as well as laying the groundwork for a new theory based both upon this feedback and my own explorations.
Over the weekend I made a trip up to Pittsburgh to listen to a good friend spin some sick dubstep and while there I got to catch up with a few of my very favorite fire spinners. Here's Grimm Zimmer doing what he does best on fans--some of the sickest fan tech I've yet seen.
A couple updates from moves of the past week: a quarter-time float out of the now-familiar stall-switch pattern and learning how to plane-shift in same direction. This leads to an atomic weave performed in diagonal planes, which I demo a variant of the Notcoleman3 in here. Finally, a couple thoughts on "hard" versus "soft" transitions based upon charlicopter's 9-square poi theory videos. There is definitely some potential here and I like the idea of moving between grids as well as adding pendulums into the mix.
A quick break from the past two weeks' theory-heavy blogs. Here are a couple random moves I've been working on in the interrim that I wanted to show off. First is drilling my way through a type of plane-bending that G is now famous for--switching between inswing linear isolations (they could also be CAPs) and horizontal linear isolations. Next are some exotic pendulum stalls I picked up from watching a recent Ronan video. I'm a huge fan of these types of stalls and keep finding new applications for them.
Over the past year I've gotten lots of queries into the stage ball poi set I've come to use most frequently in my tech blog the past few months. I've not seen another tutorial out there on how they are made (at least not on YouTube), so here goes. Hopefully if you've been interested in them, this will tell you everything you need to know to make your own set. I think Ronan had the original design, but used the end caps of juggling clubs for his handles. The use of furniture feet is an idea I borrowed from Alien Jon.
First up, I have a new website that is now hosting all my videos and minutia: please visit me on the web at http://www.drexfactor.com
Next, a quick update to last week's musings on hybrid theory. A possible hole and a fix to it...beyond that, a reply from Alien Jon got my creative juices flowing and here are five results of thinking of CAPs as segments of motion and hybrids as opposing versions of the same types of motion. These are awkward but I can see a lot of possibilities as to where thinking of motion this way could lead.
Thanks to Insignia's excellent post on hybrids, I've spent the past week reexamining the concept and working through some of the logical conundrums it presents. I find the idea of a hybrid being "a combination of two driving styles" problematic because I can't find a definition for driving style that isn't loose enough that potentially any type of movement could be considered a driving style. I think there is a simpler way to define them and it is presented here. Please please send me feedback on this one--let me know if this definition makes sense.
This past week, Insignia posted a note to Facebook trying to map out all hybrids by matching up all the driving styles he knew of: isolation, extension, cateye, antispin, pendulum, and CAP and going through them one-by-one till he'd identified all the combinations possible between them. Here is a demo of all the hybrids he listed (though I just realized I forgot cateye vs. CAP--whoops). Some of these have an interesting aesthetic value to them while some are just an utter pain in the ass.
This blog starts off with a demo of a 5-beat behind the back waistwrap that is still awkward and sloppy but I'm noticing I'm reaching for it in my BTB weaves now. Next is some explorations of the use of Yuta stalls to create horizontal flowers by stalling into an inversion rather than outswing as one usually does with this type of plane-bending. There's also some theory here as to how to use the Rastaxel stall shift pattern to create octagonal planes and finally a very special shout-out and a couple pieces of tech courtesy Mike Icon.
By popular demand: a follow-up to my last hoop tutorial, this time on the horizontal equivalent of the cateye pattern I demoed last time. It breaks down in a very similar fashion to the vertical, but requires a bit more wrist strength at a couple intervals. I've also included a brief discussion on how you can use both vertical and horizontal cateyes in conjunction with isolations and extensions to flow between tricks. This is a variation on Alien Jon's unit circle theory. For more info on this, visit his YouTube channel. Enjoy! :)
Starting off with an update on the pattern I showed off last week. Insignia had posted a comment about plane-bending in and out of it and here is a demo of the combination he mentioned. Also, I got a request for a demo of a cateye flower a couple weeks ago and here are four extrapolations of the idea. Ultimately one can look at this concept as either a flower with multiple points of rotation or as a variant on the unit circle grid idea. Please share thoughts on this as I haven't seen it demoed before.
Not the greatest doubles routine in history--I get tripped up in this one a lot, but I at least wanted to show off some of the fun stuff I've learned since I picked up doubles back in February. I recorded this one right after my most recent poi flow video on Sunday afternoon at the Malcolm X park drum circle.
So I know there's been comparatively few updates recently and this has been especially frustrating given that some updates have disappeared in the past couple days as I've tried to work out why my blogger account has stopped feeding videos to my iTunes feed.
A gig over the weekend afforded me the opportunity to pull out a pair of flag poi I hadn't used in forever and realized a lot of my tech worked even with the tails. The first minute and a half of this is choreo I'd developed for a different performance up in Philly this past weekend that didn't come together. After that it's all improv and a whole lot of fun :)
Still practicing hyperloops--I feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do with this, so repetition is key. I've also added under the legs moves to my catchup game for beginner to intermediate skills. Beyond that, I keep finding more stuff I love to do with CAPs. First up is taking the flower stall switch from last week and instead switching to a CAP. In wallplane, it creates a really cool pattern that I want to play with more.
On world hoop day, I found myself teaching a large crowd of hoopers how to do a move that's called a cateye in poi. Here's a to-do for it being as how I haven't seen another video tutorial out there for it. To see this move in action, check out videos by Rainbow Michael or Sean Stogner.
An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here are Jordan from the Vulcan Crew, Bliss, and Prisna spinning some fire right before I left the jam. It does get a bit blurry near the end, I'm afraid. Enjoy!
My video blog is now a year old--huzzah! Starting off with a switch between hybrid stall switches and CAPs as shown by Mel in his latest performance video, I play around more with these types of stall switches and how you can plane shift with them or get in and out of them from any split-time same direction stall. Also, a stall pattern out of flowers demoed in a recent Nick Woolsey video, my hyperloops are looking better, and a short exploration of the type of horizontal antispin flower plane shifts that G has become famous for.
An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here is Arashi, dancing with Bliss and exploring some ellipsoids, linear patterns, and other funky patterns solo.
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.
An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here is Sean from Flowtoys spinning his double staves, doing some really cool 3D patterns I've never seen before. Enjoy!
An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here is G doing a ton of plane-bends and stall shifting, as well as a brief glimpse of some of the diagonal planes he and Alien Jon have been working on.
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:
After an awesome couple weeks hanging out with some of my favorite poi spinners on the east coast, I've gotten to learn a lot about split-time stall shifts in the style of Rastaxel. Insignia has been taking these and adding a plane-bent flourish in the middle. I showed this pattern to Baz and he came up with an over the arm stall. I added a Yuta stall shift to Baz's motion and though it looks sloppy I've been having a lot of fun with it. I think I may have prematurely christened the spherical CAP--I described it by the pattern it adds up to rather than its component pieces.
Two weeks ago at Boom Boat, Insignia showed off some spherical CAP ideas that really sent me back to the drawing board to see what was possible. Here are some of those ideas rendered, plus some more fun stall switching patterns and head orbit play.
I've been lucky enough that the past couple weeks I've gotten to catch up with some of my favorite east coast poi spinners and gotten to shoot a little bit of video of some of the cool tricks they've been working on. Here's the first of two videos: Baz Simon doing some plane-bending tech at our friend Aaron's (Fractal) wedding.
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:
At boomboat over the weekend, Christian pointed out to me that all my CAP plane-bending experiments had overlooked a very obvious possibility: performing a CAP in horizontal plane. This, it turns out, is also an awesome transition to diagonal plane CAPs. Also, A bizarre property of CAP transitions into full-arm movements. It turns out that the four basic combinations of timing and directions have three transition points with the most common CAPs, so halving a flower gives you three of the four combinations--not two. Any mathematicians can tell me why?
Not as heavy on poi, but still hella fun to watch. Noel, Greg, and Jordan transferring balls in square patterns is probably my favorite moment of this video.
Starting off with a couple tricks I'd consider to be a little bit older school style tech than I usually work with--the first is inspired by rope dart tricks that shoot the head off in the opposite direction it's been wrapped in. Next is a trick that uses releases to transition from meltdown to behind-the-back waistwraps and back. This is sketchy! Next, in order to get down the spherical CAPs I've been working on the past few weeks, I've been doing drills to get my hands used to doing quarter-beat stalls in same-time opposites.
Waiting for an oil change gave me a perfect chance to try out some flow! Not terribly dancey or big in footwork, but there are some cool experiments with pendulums, wraps, and LOTS of plane-changing here. Not all of it works terribly well, but there are some cool transitions in here. Also--some attempts at dropping the spherical CAP pattern into flow. Enjoy!
I'm trying to think if there are two more different skills I could have spent the last week playing with. Among the gaps in my knowledge are airwraps and how to get out of hyperloops. This week I finally set down to learn how this type of motion works and by and large the practice has been paying off. Also I've spent a lot of time working on the spherical CAP pattern I theorized about last week, breaking it down to each incremental movement.
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.
Based upon a pendulum stall trick Baz taught me a few months ago, here's a variant that makes use of plane-bending out of stalls. Also: I've been working a lot more with elliptical CAP patterns and have a presentable version of the split-time opposites pattern. Finally, based upon Charlie's responses to my video on CAPs and plane-bending last week, a little bit of theory and three approaches to taking elliptical CAP patterns to spherical CAP patterns. One is (very roughly) demoed. Give me another week and we'll see if I can put together the others cleanly.
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.
So regrettably these didn't come out as clean as I'd hoped, but I think there's still enough here to give folks some ideas of what's possible when you combine CAPs and plane-bending. I know there's a lot of stuff that could have been demoed but wasn't--I'll hopefully fill in gaps as time goes on or if this gives some of you out there ideas, I'd love to see some responses.
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).
A highly fortuitous meeting with Alien Jon in Barcelona led to the first trick here, combining plane-bending with a concept I was unfamiliar with called diagonal planes. Currently I can only plane bend with it or turn, but I suspect other tricks will begin to emerge using these techniques. Second, at Wildfire Noel showed me a double-staff trick wherein one alternates one hand doing antispin and the other hand sliding straight across the body along its own axis which creates an 8-step move that one can easily break out of into any number of other patterns.
G is the best poi spinner you've never heard of. I'd never heard of him before heading to Firedrums back in April and seriously I was blown away by him. While most of us have dabbled in plane-bending at one point or another (beginners plane-bend unintentionally all the time), few have taken it to the jaw-dropping extremes G has. Essentially, every stall is a zero point that can be used to transition to a different plane. All of the bizarre plane-bending combos I've been working on in the past few months have been inspired by his work.
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.
No, I regret this isn't an entry on Warren Ellis's landmark sci-fi satire comic book series (I'm still figure out a way to make it apply to poi ;), the title is a great excuse to give it a plug. The planetary I'm talking about is the system by which planets rotate around a solar mass and create systems of compound elliptical orbits.
After an exhausting but wonderfully fun and educational weekend at the PEX Summer Festival, I've got a whole bunch of new tech courtesy the patient guidance of Richmond's Lucas Boyd. First up is a plane-bending exercise I've started playing with to explore all three planes by transitioning between them with floats. I've got same-time same direction and same-time opposites so far. After that, some cool CAP effects including a way to transition between CAPS using linear extensions, which also adds one more type of CAP turn to those I demoed in my tutorial a few weeks ago.
A demo of the cube Charlie demonstrated for me at Wildfire--this takes seven plane shifts to accomplish and works through crossed arms, wall plane, and buzzsaw positions. A real challenge, but a fun one! Next up is a plane-changing pattern that works between opposites same-time and corkscrew into a kind of pendulum stall before reversing itself into the exact same pattern it started as. I really like how the reverse of this pattern is itself, whereas reversing most poi sequences require you to reverse the directions of all your movements.
Now here's a bizarre problem for you: how do you correct the way your body is built and moves?
At about the age of 12, I lost the arches in my feet and spent 15 years with orthodic insoles in my shoes, avoiding running long distances because they would cause my knees to swell and lock up for days. Needless to say, it kind of sucked.
So apparently a trend has begun of doing videos for poi footwork and now the godfather of poi, Nick Woolsey has posted one describing how he does his whirling dervish-style footwork. Special guest-stars include Burning Dan and Alien Jon!
Back from Wildfire and lots of videos are popping up...mostly from Christian and myself. Helpfully, both of us recorded a couple lesson sessions and noodling. Here are some of my favorites from the weekend:
Bliss, Brandon (NC), Julia and Kathryn from Barefoot Monkeys, Ricky from A Different Spin, and a bunch of other folks I don't know spin doubles together on the last night of Wildfire. Regrettably, the camera went unrecoverably blurry toward the end, but there's a lot of cool stuff before it gets there.
At Wildfire, Charlie and I worked through all the four compass points of a cateye and worked out the stalls that transitioned out of each point--there is some crossover here with the Yuta stalls I was playing with two weeks ago. The thing that's got my brain burning (and unfortunately I haven't had shit for time to play with them) is elliptical CAP patterns of the type Zan is showing off in the Encyclo-Poi-Dia 2. My initial breakdown of this move turned out to be incorrect, so I'll be working out the proper iterations of it in the coming week.
I'm off to Wildfire today for what looks like a full docket of awesome classes. I'll have my camera with me, so expect lots of footage of the East Coast's answer to Firedrums. If you're there, I'm teaching weaves at 9:30 tomorrow morning, pendulums at 4, and flowers bring and early tomorrow morning again at 9:30.
Hopefully the forecasts of buckets of rain for this part of Connecticut are exaggerated :-P
No, I regret this isn't an entry on Warren Ellis's landmark sci-fi satire comic book series (I'm still figure out a way to make it apply to poi ;), the title is a great excuse to give it a plug. The planetary I'm talking about is the system by which planets rotate around a solar mass and create systems of compound elliptical orbits.