This was a fun move I was taught at the Wesleyan Winter Fire Arts retreat last weekend in Midtown, Connecticut. One can think of it as being somewhat similar to both Supermans and Fantastic Fours, but uses a very different timing. Part of the fun here is the combo that leads into it, which has several steps and looks more difficult and complex than it really is.

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It's impossible to overstate how silly a move this is--performing barrel rolls with a 3-beat superman! Here's the basic idea: take one half of a normal barrel roll and one half of a 2-beat weave and you can get a bit of a barrel roll to work with the superman. It's not a full barrel roll, unfortunately (don't know if that's even possible with a superman), but it is entertaining to try ;) Beware tangles!

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Last week in New York, Noel taught me this fun variant on the Fantastic Four. One of the things I really dig about it is that it really is the Fantastic Four we all know and love with only one significant tweak, so if you've already got the FF, this move isn't so huge a leap. 3-beat, though? Not sure if the name really encompasses it.

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I love poi moves with superhero names! This one's been on the back burner for a while, but checking out Tim Goddard's tutorial on the move broke down many of the barriers I'd been running up against. While looped in with supermans, I actually think this move is a slightly different beast, but an extremely useful one because it allows you to switch the planes your poi are moving in when spinning in a meteor fashion.

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Spent a bunch of time working on this at Burning Man and Tahoe and finally have something worth seeing! Turning with a 3-beat superman is an interesting challenge because it frequently requires a type of counter rotation that can kill the momentum of the poi and therefore the move. Here are some tips on how to get around these problems--also, it was filmed in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life :)

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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!

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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.

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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!

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This is a meteor-inspired move from the glowsticking community. Marvin Ong was the first to show it to me and both Kate McCoy and Noel Yee have done some cool expansions on this idea. I'd had a rough time learning how to do it because my one-handed poi isn't terribly good, but I'd come up with at least one trick that had made it easier. Here's how I made it work for myself.

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