DrexFactor Poi Blog

Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Behind the Back Waistwraps

Following up from last week's video on waistwraps, here is how you can accomplish waist wraps behind the back. It helps to have the behind the back weave under your belt, but if you've got that piece of the puzzle, this isn't that big a leap.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #324: Box mode plane-bent Zan's diamond

Based on some of Tracy Wilhelm's work on plane bending Zan's Diamond, here is the full pattern built in box mode, with the traverses through the middle being on diagonals rather than straight up and down. Thanks for the inspiration, Tracy!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #323: Isobend toroid hybrids

Mashing up the isobend-4 toroid with all the even-petalled flowers, here are all timing and direction combinations, including both wheel and wall plane together opposites. For the background on isobend toroids and how they relate to antibend and probend, check out this video here: http://youtu.be/IrS-NdpnEHo

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Waistwraps, part 1

This week we're going to talk about waistwraps, which are a way of adapting three-beat weaves into a wall plane orientation. They require having your turns in both directions down, but the trick is that you'll always be turning across your body in the same direction so that you stay facing the audience.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #322: Toroid Triangle Rhapsody (how to)

Based upon the toroids I uploaded the previous Monday (http://youtu.be/XA5d4yoS97w), here's a long how-to on how you can perform each of them and integrate these toroid triangles into your spinning.

 

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"I can't do that."

This is one of those phrases that generates within me very conflicting emotions when I hear it...on my less proud days, it makes me annoyed. It’s a wall they’ve imposed between themselves and whatever they’re seeing and there’s a part of me that grits my teeth and wants to tell them, “well...sure you can’t, as long as that’s your attitude.” Which is a pat response to an even more pat statement and seldom very constructive.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #321: Toroid triangle rhapsody

Inspired by a recent photograph of some really gorgeous toroid triangles put together (https://s3.amazonaws.com/com.offerpop.datastore/276469/UhwaNA.png) I went on a little bit of a quest to put together a bunch of different toroid triangle orientations and found fun ways to integrate them into my spinning in surprising ways, including plane shifting and inversions.

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Tuck Turns

If you've got your basic reel turns down, tuck turns are an easy next step that can add an additional level of visual immediacy to your turns. They're also the first example many of us encounter of a type of movement that plays a huge part in later moves called body tracing.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #320: 3/5 Time in Toroid Pentagrams

A few weeks ago, I posted a video showing 3/5 time for antispin pentagrams and now I've (kind of) got it with toroids--the active issue here of course being how you avoid them tangling with each other mid-move. It turns out the recipe for this is to take Arashi's concept of a crane and apply it to each separate set of corners of the toroid.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #318: Wheel plane opposites inversions

As promised: here is a breakdown of how to perform a split-opposites inversion in wheel plane. It's helpful to think of it as the path of the inversion being tilted up and around so that the rules we're used to get reversed for the hand that is going backwards.

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