Man...this video totally started out as something very different indeed ;) I wanted to show off a couple ideas for contact combos I'd been working with, then I wound up with too many of them for a single tech blog...and then Tim Goddard posted his video about tapedeck toroids and it got my creative gears turning. So...here is an interesting hodgepodge of different tech ideas. Enjoy! :)

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A collection of my favorite poi tricks I've learned and played with since March of this year. Some of these have wound up in tech blogs or performance choreography but most of them haven't. Featuring a lot of body tracers, contact rolls, stacking, funky hybrids and more!

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This is a folding line that Keith Marshall taught me this past weekend as we waited for a bus. It comes from an outer forearm roll that rolls past the shoulder back to cradle, so it sets up the potential of chaining many of the same rolls together for infinite folding lines.

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This is one of those tricks I've seen and lusted after for the past year--I finally had the chance to put in some concerted work on it and it wound up not being as hard as I feared. The most important insight when it comes to this move is realizing that it's essentially a body tracer performed as a contact trick. Once you've got that part down, the rest fits together easily.

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The last performance I gave of "Icarus", the piece I created for the New York Flow Show. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, a skilled Minoan craftsman who created the Labyrinth. Both were imprisoned in the complex till Daedalus built wings out of wood, wax, and feathers for them to fly out and escape. During the attempt, Icarus was so consumed with the elation of flight that he flew higher and higher till the heat from the sun melted his wings and he plunged back down to his death.

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I've been playing around with a lot of single poi manipulations of late and kept finding myself holding both ends of the poi and not knowing what to do with it. This trick came out of trying to find more options for this position. If you can do forearm transfers straight back and forth, this move is a great way to break them up.

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Another fishtail-based move from Kate's video a few months ago. This one incorporates a fishtail with a tic-tac on the other hand to create a weave with one hand performing the afore-mentioned contact move. Watch out--this one is even harder than learning the original fishtail was!

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This was an interesting discovery based upon messing up a trick I was trying to do: there's a great way to take horizontal body tracers and use them as an entry point for negative space combos and contact rolls.

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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!

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