DrexFactor Poi Blog

Video Tech Blog #101: pendulum vs CAP transitions

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!

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Home from PEX Summer Festival

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.

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Video Tech Blog #100: plane-bent (torus) flowers

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!

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Alien Jon and Major Thom: three poi passing

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).

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Video Tech Blog #99: soft transition constructs

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.

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Summer session poi classes

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.

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Video Tech Blog #98: Basic contact poi

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.

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Video Tech Blog #97: Plane-shift intensive

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.

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Video Tech Blog #96: triquetra vs pendulum hand switching

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!

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Video Tech Blog #95: hard, soft, and mixed transitions as plane-bends

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! :)

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