Teddy brought me this challenge a couple weeks ago in New York City--turning with one-handed 1.5s. It took a lot of work and there's a lot of places where it can tangle terribly, but hopefully the end result is close enough for government work ;)

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #384_ One-handed 1.5 turns(1).mp4

My first attempt at a video compilation with my new GoPro! :) A couple of these are a little hazy because I forgot to clean the lense in between takes and there was a hell of a lot of pollen in the air. Thanks so much to all the folks who let me video them! :)

Music: "The City" by The 1975

Performers:
Jeremy Croxton
Doodle
Drex
Tim Goddard
Hex
Spinnabel
Sticky
Justin Warren & Christina Koller

Fire dancing--hoop, poi, and staff with GoPro!.mp4

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.

techblog369.mp4

Chris Kelly does this really nifty 3-poi trick that I edited into the Top 10 video for this year where he does a CAP going one way and a point iso vs extension going the other way. His version has a CAP in the opposite hand, but I found I could synchronize this trick with a static spin to create some lovely tribrid lines. Demonstrated here in both opposites and same direction.

techblog368.mp4

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!

techblog367.mp4

A few people have been asking about this move in the online poi forums over the past couple months--Zan shows off a version of it in the Arizona Transmission video, but as of yet I wasn't aware of much other work being done on it in the wider community. Yesterday I managed to get the move down fairly consistently (at the cost of the callouses in between my ring finger and pinkie :-/) and was happy to find that the method I've been teaching to learn Zan's Diamond in my Fundamentals of Tech class totally works for the one-handed version, too.

techblog366.mp4

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.

techblog365.mp4

This one's been a while in the works: trying to do a polyrhythm hybrid with only one hand! The trick here is to remember which poi is closer at which point in the shape so you can aim it accordingly. Cool looking trick but requires a lot of work and accuracy!

techblog364.mp4

Triquetra vs pendulum is probably my favorite poi move, but it's kind of a misnomer because the triquetra is really something more like a CAP. With that in mind, I came up with this other CAP and combined it with an extension to create a different move that in some respects inverts elements of triquetra vs pendulum while still including many if not all of the elements of this move.

techblog363.mp4

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! :)

falltechcomp.mp4