Weird Science :: Written Posts

Awesome Poi Compilation Video

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

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

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My poi are not a tool

My poi are not a tool. They are not a prop. They are not an artificial entity upon which I imbue meaning and metaphor. My poi are not another person or a cell phone. My poi are not a belt or a cup of coffee. My poi are an extension of me. My poi are a part of me. They are a living, breathing extension of my hopes, dreams, and ambitions. They feel my sadness and joy, my aches and pains. They are as much a part of me as my hands, fingers, and eyes. They are an extension of my expression. They emote with my pursed lips. They leap for joy with my springy legs. My poi are not an other thing.

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Fall Festival Schedule!

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

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

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Spring Festival Schedule

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

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

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10 Commandments for Tech Poi Spinners

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.

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Why I spin

 There is something very unique about life.

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Winter 2012 Workshop Tour!

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!

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The Foreways Project

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.

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DrexFactor returns to NYC!

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!

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For Love of Teaching

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.

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Who's more engaged? A Facebook and Google+ case study

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!

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New York Poi Workshop November 12

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

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

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Charlie's QFT instruction videos--now easier to watch!

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.

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The Talent Trap

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.

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A special message from Drex

A personal request to my viewers: I want to be out teaching more and I need y'alls help to make it happen. Here's how:

Like my page on Facebook so I can tell you when I come to your town:
http://www.facebook.com/drexfactorpoi

Request that I come to your city either on my website of my Eventful page:
http://www.drexfactor.com
http://www.eventful.com/DrexFactor

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

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On the merits of arguing Poi frameworks

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.

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A Beginners' guide to Poi (QFT) Notation

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.

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Horizontal stacks take off!

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.

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New python program--this one finds transition points

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).

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The Poi Heresies: why 3-petal antispin flowers are not triquetras

What is a triquetra?

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.

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Soft, Hard, and Mixed Transition Theory

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.

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Notes from my class on transitions

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.

Class outline
Cheat sheet

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New session of poi classes at Contradiction Dance

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.

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The great Kenya adventure, Part 5

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.

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The Great Kenya Adventure, Part 4

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.

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