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.

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 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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Starting off with a variant on an antispin shape I played around with a few weeks back--this time I'm realizing one can switch back and forth between which hand is doing antispin and which is doing extension on the wrapping and unwrapping--an effect I think is really cool. Next, some more atomic flowers based upon stall patterns and a switch that I didn't realize I'd ripped off from Insignia. Finally, some hybrid turns with the triquetra--vs. pendulum and vs. static spin.

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