DrexFactor Poi Blog

Drex's Poi Tech Blog #308.5: PomGrips from LanternSmith

Charlie Cushing's company LanternSmith has really carved itself out a rather unique niche among poi spinners for creating really comfortable and functional handles. The company's latest efforts are similar in form factor to PX3 knobs but are made of silicone and are wonderfully soft and grippy. Here, Ted Petrosky and I review the handles after an afternoon spent playing with them. You can pick them up here: http://www.lanternsmith.com/poi_ropedart_meteor/pom_grip.html

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Wraps

Wraps are a nifty tool for switching directions and all-around looking cool that poi borrows from the glowsticking and nunchukus worlds. Here are some basics as to how they can be performed and what they can be wrapped around to create nifty effects your audience will dig!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #308: Graph Theory and Poi Paths

Graph theory is surprisingly integral to a lot of patterns that we play with--essentially any time you're dealing with a number of points you're trying to hit in a given sequence and repeat them, you're using graph theory to solve the problem. Here's a little bit of history as to how graph theory came to be and some helpful hints that may help you solve those pesky poi patterns. :)

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: The stall workout part 2

Part 2 of the stall workout series! This time we'll be going through all the antispin stalls, which wind up being different because the stall goes through your body core rather than around it.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #307 The (real) definition of plane facing

A couple weeks ago I uploaded a tech blog defining various terms related to a discussion I was having with Alien Jon and Arashi on the Poi Theory group related to inversions and the like. I biffed it a little on defining plane facing, so here is a correction.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #306: Toroid triangle weave (now with both hands)

Taking up a challenge from Kai McHaggerty after I posted my first video on a toroid triangle weave to come up with a version of this move wherein both hands are performing a toroid triangle, here it is with both hands performing two toroid triangles in the course of a weave. Fun challenge :)

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: The stall workout part 1

Having problems getting your stalls down? Here's the first part of a workout, that if you can master it will give you access to nearly any stall you could possibly want to play with. It bears some resemblance to Yuta's 8 stall theory but applies to every timing and direction combination.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #305: Toroid triangle weave

Another attempt to merge together toroids with weaves and inversions--this one takes a simple two-beat weave and adds a toroid triangle to it.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #304: Are inversions really tangles?

A lot of the recent work on inversions both in my videos and others has been based on the notion that inversions and tangles are different versions of the same movement. After playing with them both in the quark/atom framework, I'm realizing the entry for them uses an atom quark rather than a tangle quark. Could this be diagnostic of the difference between an inversion and a tangle or a nifty side-effect of another phenomenon?

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #303: Plane facing, C-points, and Z-points

Coming out of a long discussion on Tech Poi and Poi Theory on Facebook: in trying to define inversions and all the various related types of movement, three new pieces of vocab I was unfamiliar with came up. Here they are for the purposes of education and opening up the debate to everyone.

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