DrexFactor Poi Blog

Charlie blindfold burn Sunday night Summer Wildfire 2011

Charlie blindfold burn Sunday night Summer Wildfire 2011

No votes yet

On the merits of arguing Poi frameworks

We all know this story...you're at a festival, spin jam, or on an online forum and somebody mentions a trick or concept you've played a lot with. So much so that you have a framework worked out in your head for how to understand that move and how many other moves interlock with it. You speak up and say, "x move is a type of y and here's why!" And so begins a lengthy debate over the nature of the move that can at times get heated. Each person clings to their understanding and points out the logical fallacies in the other approach.

Your rating: None Average: 4 (1 vote)

Video Tech Blog #187: BTH hybrid pirouette

Kris Valles sent me a request a couple months ago for a tutorial on how to do this move out of a Nicky Evers video. It's not terribly hard, but it does teach some nifty body mechanics. It also results in one hell of a shitty night if you get motion sickness from it as I did ;)

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Video Tech Blog #186: Digital camcorder review (for poi spinners ;)

Over the weekend, my beloved Flip was stolen from me, so I took it as an opportunity to go try out other cameras in its class to find out which was the best for a poi video blogger to play with. The cameras I compared were the Kodak Playsport (I goofed in the video and referred to it as a Playshare), the Flip HD, and the Sony Bloggie. There's a lot of reviews of these cameras out there, but I thought it would be interesting to approach them from the perspective of a poi spinner rather than the average reviewer.

No votes yet

Video Tech Blog #185: Compound horizontal stacks

Last week, a poi spinner by the name of Joe Graff stopped into DC and e6 and I got the chance to hang out and spin with him in Malcolm X Park. He showed off a type of stacking I'd seen in videos but hadn't quite parsed out, but when performed in person realized represented an approach to compounding horizontal stacks that opened the door for switching up the alignments of poi and hand in many of the stacks that we play with.

No votes yet

Video Tech Blog #184: toroid triangle weave

A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.

No votes yet

Video Tech Blog #183: the hybrid family challenge

This is a little bit of an experiment in interactivity with this vlog. I've played a lot in recent videos with the concept of a hybrid family--a move that will interlock with other moves at a specific or multiple positions. I've take this idea to the point where I can take some of my favorite moves and at each of the 4 compass points be able to transition to a completely different type of move. In this vid I demo triquetra vs pendulum and use it to switch to a point isolation, a windmill, a horizontal stack, and a unit circle hybrid.

No votes yet

Video Tech Blog #182: Diagonal plane-bending thingie

By popular request, here is the breakdown of how I do the plane-bendy diagonal thing from my last odds and ends video. It's essentially just a corkscrew with a lockout on either side that has been plane-bent to put the lockouts in a diagonal plane. One of the cool things about this, then, is that it integrates well with another diagonal plane-bending move that Alien Jon demoed in the Arizona Transmission video a couple years ago.

No votes yet

Video Tech Blog #181 Odds and Ends 4 (stacks, diagonals, BTH)

A bunch of random combos I've been working on in the past couple months. The stacking stuff was based upon playing with the idea of leash tracing with the head or hand--something that came out of a move Charlie showed me at Fall WF last year, as well as maintaining right angles in the orientation of the poi to each other. The second stacking combo is very similar to the first, but there's a small difference in the timing that makes the difference between the tracing and actually having a moment where the right angle is seen in full relief.

No votes yet

Video Tech Blog #180: Intro to inversions and introversions part 2

Part 2 in my series on beginner level inversion and introversion play. Last video we practiced individual elements of these moves and here we combine them together--first by taking any 2 together, then all 3, then a funky fountain variant that utilizes the type that seems like an airwrap or hyperloop. There's plenty more fun down this well, so be sure to check out some of Alien Jon, Ky Lee, Christian, and Baz's videos for more inverted goodness.

No votes yet