2016 has been a really incredible year in so very many different ways. Now that it's nearly over, I wanted to share some of my highlights from this year with you all :)

My first big project of the year was my Flow Arts 101 series. This 10-video series was intended to be a primer on the world of the Flow Arts both for people who've been in it a while as well as people who are curious about them as well. The series covered everything from spin jams to fire safety and everything in between!

It was the most challenging series I've ever worked on from a technical as well as production standpoint, requiring several hours of research for each video and forcing me to up my game as an editor. A follow-up series is planned for 2017!

I've spent a huge portion of the past two years working on partner poi with Morgan Howe, a Barefoot Monkeys alum with a background in ballet. We both had an ambition to write partner poi choreography that would be informed by dance--telling stories and creating characters. Because we lived on opposite coasts, we could only get together to create material every few months, so it took a year and a half for us to write a complete piece.

Happily, we were able to perform the piece at this year's Flow Show SF and get it on film, allowing us to share with the rest of the flow arts world our unique spin on partner poi, including not one but two dance-inspired lifts!

Three years ago I co-founded a performance troupe in Washington, DC and my secret hope was that it would eventually become a platform by which I could create dance concerts utilizing prop manipulation. This year that ambition finally became a reality! For the past three years, Revolutionary Motion has been blessed to participate in the Burning Man fire conclave and this year we translated the work we'd done for conclave to a stage production at the Anacostia Arts Center in Washington, DC.

For two nights, we performed a piece we'd written called "Emergence" that used flow arts and dance to explore the tension and between modernity and tradition, using the Renaissance and Enlightenment as our guides. The show pushed us to our limits physically and creatively and I could not be more proud of it.

Finally, I launched a new video series in the fall called 1-minute tutorials. Having spent a lot of time on Facebook and Instagram this year I've had a hard time reconciling my desire for educational outreach with the limits of these two platforms. Instagram limits content to a single minute and neither platform will play audio by default.

Taking a cue from videos from Buzzfeed as well as other sources, I began experimenting with tutorials that featured text overlays and that would last for no longer than one minute to be able to be crossposted on Instagram and Facebook. On a lark, I started posting these videos on YouTube as well and they've rapidly become some of my most popular content.

I'm super grateful to each of you that has decided to be a part of my world in the past year. I hope the content you've gotten from me has inspired you, taught you something new, and given you fuel to fire your own creative impulses. What would you like to see in 2017? Let me know by replying to this email!

Happy New Year to you and your friends and loved ones!