DrexFactor Poi Blog

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #296: Inverted toroid pentagram

This was a nifty idea hatched over the weekend: toroid pentagrams and inversions tend to be moves with the same number of beats, so can they be mashed up together? The answer apparently is yes! This took a whole lot of practice and doing to make a reality, but the result is a pentagram being used as one side of a series of inversions--a great mashup of at least three different techniques I've played with on my tech blog in the past few months.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #295: Quarks in weaves

Following up on some of the threads from #293, here's a few weave-based moves switched into an atomic context with vertical vs horizontal planes. Funny thing: the inversion in atomics utilizes a tangle arrangement whereas these weaves utilize an atom arrangement--in other words, they possess opposite polarities, to borrow a term from Tracy Wilhelm.

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Poi Dancing: Autumn Leaves 10-21-2012

It's been quite a long time since I've uploaded a flow video and the unusually warm weather we've had in DC the past couple weeks inspired me to get out and put a few things to video. Things to look out for: lots of single poi manipulations, toroids, inversions, and more!

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Hoop Dance Tutorial: Antispin Flowers

Branching out a little bit! Learning antispin flowers with a hoop is similar to how one can learn them with poi. Here's a way to learn both 3 and 4-petal antispin flowers while doing off the body hoop.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #294: The 4 Atoms

Any time two planes overlap (read: are not parallel), they overlap in one of four different ways: cranes, butterflies, atoms, or tangles. In the first three arrangements, it's possible to keep the poi rotating without interfering with each other. I'm pretty sure that any and all tangles result from the final atom shape. Here's a handy-dandy diagram that breaks this down in an easy-to-read fashion: http://www.drexfactor.com/sites/default/files/atomicclashes.jpg

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #293: Atomic inversions

After learning both the split opposites and split same direction inversions, it dawned on me that a body could think of these as being different projections of a split-L 3D shape. If this is the case, one could open up into a horizontal versus vertical atomic shape and produce the shape in this video above--there are many more a-coming! :)

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Isolations

Isolations are an essential ingredient for hybrids and just plain look cool. Here's a couple of my favorite drills for getting isolations down.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #292: One-handed Superman

This is a meteor-inspired move from the glowsticking community. Marvin Ong was the first to show it to me and both Kate McCoy and Noel Yee have done some cool expansions on this idea. I'd had a rough time learning how to do it because my one-handed poi isn't terribly good, but I'd come up with at least one trick that had made it easier. Here's how I made it work for myself.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #291: Inversions and crosspoints

After learning how to do inversions in Tog-Opposites, I noticed something peculiar about the arrangement of the cross points in all the opposite direction inversions I'd played with--they always appeared to be pointing away from each other while the inversions I'd worked with in split-time same direction tended always to have the crosspoint in the same direction. Question is: is it diagnostic of how inversions work or a cool byproduct of them?

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Basic Poi Dancing Tutorial: Corkscrews

Corkscrews are usually the first floor plane move that many poi spinners learn. It's fundamentally a chase move with the hands moving up and down the body while the poi rotate in a horizontal plane. Here are a few tricks on how to get down this trick.

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