DrexFactor Poi Blog

Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Buzzsaw Fountains

Buzzsaw fountains were one of my favorite challenges in my first year of spinning poi and it wasn't until much later that I realized they were creating some of the basic skills necessary to get into inversions and barrel rolls later. Here is how you can practice this type of movement and get set up inside moves.

 

Your rating: None Average: 5 (2 votes)

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #353: Superman antispin and hybrid flowers

An awesome connect the dots moment! Previously on my tech blog we played around with the idea of doing 3-beat weaves with supermans. We can apply this same idea to flowers by turning the superman into a body-traced 4-petal antispin flower or 2-petal inspin flower. You can then combine it with the other hand to get either a pair of antispins or a hybrid flower along the lines of VTG tech!

 

Your rating: None Average: 4 (2 votes)

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #352: Reverse Superman and turns

One of those challenges I took up at Burning Man this year was to add the reverse Superman to my repertoire of tricks and it turned out to be a really interesting challenge given that the timing for it feels completely different from the timing of a forwards superman. The great part of getting it down, however is being able to turn and do waistwraps with it.

 

No votes yet

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #351: Thumb led meteor and 3 poi weaves

When I did my tutorial on 3 poi weaves a couple weeks ago, I thought the waistwrap would be switching between thumb led and poi led, but at Wildfire I was shown it's much easier to keep the move in thumb led when making this turn. It feels a little awkward to me, but makes up for it in making the move smoother overall and this effect really comes across in the 360 degree turns you do with it.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Footwork in turns

Figured out basic turns but still finding they feel awkward? The problem might be in your feet! This is one of those problems that many of us who lack a movement background tend to encounter as we engage with poi spinning--our bodies aren't used to moving at all, let alone in a way that comes off as graceful. Compounding the problem, it feels as though our arms should be leading the way through our turns, but this seldom is good for us either aesthetically or physically.

No votes yet

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #350: 3 and 4 beat Superman weaves

Last weekend at Wildfire I taught at 3-poi class that essentially turned into a skill share and one of the cooler things I saw during said skill share was Noel showing us how to do a 3-beat weave with a superman. It's not hard to get there and it sets up both the possibility of doing the weave as an atomic as well as a 4-beat variant. I don't know if a 5-beat is possible, but it would sure be a challenge!

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Spiral Wraps

Spiral wraps are a great crowd pleaser and they aren't that terribly difficult to learn. Here are two approaches to go about it so you can learn both spiral wraps that go around both hands as well as the glowstringer-inspired approach where both wrap around the same hand.

 

Your rating: None Average: 3 (1 vote)

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #349: Pendulum vs cateye transitions

A cool poi trick that came out of an experiment from an earlier tech vid: when performing the transition from pendulum vs CAP to static vs point iso, that static vs point iso can serve to transition into either cateye vs iso or cateye vs isolated pendulum. Both have a really cool bouncy effect and make use of something I dearly love about poi: the capacity to create moves that establish relationships between the poi and hands.

 

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #348: 3-poi spiral wraps

Following up from my video last week, taking that meteor spiral wrap and applying it to a three-poi environment. Ironically, I find this easier to do than the meteor version, but it does require a lot of work to understand the ins and outs of the 2-beats that lead up to it. Here are a few tips for getting there.

Your rating: None Average: 3.1 (8 votes)

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #347: Horizontal stacks with flowers

One of those things that came out of the final days of the Spring festival tour, a funny little curiosity that Keith promptly pronounced his favorite trick I'd done in the past few months. It's actually Mel's old stacking trick, but made out of 2-petal inspin flowers rather than repeated stalls. Part of the benefit there is that it's easy to switch directions with it.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)