I've just wrapped up a series of videos on Partner Weaves--this blog entry is meant to serve as a summary on the stuff that was covered in them. First and foremost, this series covered partner weaves in a personal timing and directinon of split-time opposite direction. My partner Morgan and I discovered as we played with these at Pacific Fire Festival that there were four transitions we could use to switch the location of each of us relative to each other. We learned some of these switches from our friends Justin Warren and Christina Koller, who dub the concepts slides and pivots.

We're using a slightly different framing of the concept than what they think of, however. In our framework, slides are any transition in which you switch the relative position of each partner in relation to the audience while preserving the direction they're facing. While sliding, a performer has the option of performing a flower petal, a stall, a 180 degree turn, or a 180 degree turn with a stall and as it turns out each has unique qualities that determine the resulting partner weave or whether one is even possible to begin with.

We discovered through our work at PacFire that when performing either vanilla slides or performing a turn with a stall, the direction of the weave would be preserved, whereas if a performer did either a stall or a turn, the resulting weave would wind up in the opposite of the starting direction. This is useful to know, because it means that when partners are improvising around these concepts, all they need to know is whether they're maintaining the same direction through the transition or switching it and in which direction their partner will be moving.

Justin and Christina refer to the former property as a slide and the latter a pivot. Both systems of terminology work, but we like being able to define the movement as well as the components that led to it.

To help those of you out there working on these concepts out, Morgan and I have prepared a couple of diagrams to outline both each and every possible transition as well as whittling them down to easy directions for an individual performer. Morgan's approach has been to create a visual representation of the transitions between moves and the relationships between them whereas I've created a matrix of start and end positions and the transitions between them in table form. The exact same data is in both charts, but we've made each available knowing that different representations work better for different learning styles.

Dig in and learn them all for yourselves! Thanks so much to Justin and Christina for setting us down this road and for my awesome partner Morgan for her patience and creativity through this process and defining these moves for ourselves :)

Download these charts as a PDF!