DrexFactor Poi Blog

The Great Kenya Adventure, Part 4

Saturday morning: last night was a magical mystery tour with Sarakasi and James. Today it's the hamlets kids we're going to teach. Will Ruddick has been on a bus from Mombasa all night and arrives before I wake up in the morning. There is a package waiting for us at the Post Office in town--the last pieces from the United States we need for the program. Already we've gotten a 100 foot roll of 2" wide kevlar, 40 high-quality fishing swivels, and 40 quick links. The hardware goes so fast as we build, so though all the numbers seem high, we're still budgeting appropriately.

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The great Kenya Adventure, Part 3

For just over two weeks we've drilled and run new concepts. We've played with choreo and fine-tuned what we already have. I can teach until I turn blue in the face, but ultimately what will prove the mettle for any performer is a big crowd and all the crazy uncertainty it brings. It can turn shy, introverted wallflowers into dynamic giants or leave outgoing extroverts weeping in embarrassment. Ultimately, you never know entirely who you are as a performer until you hit that stage.

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The great Kenya adventure, Part 2

Every teacher knows their job is not just as simple as telling their students what to do and leaving it at that (or at least, all good teachers do). On one level you have to keep those students who are zipping ahead of the class engaged while making sure that those who just aren't getting it don't get left too far behind.

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The great Kenya adventure, Part 1

Hello, all! I'm writing to you from the wilds of Kenya...well, okay...an apartment on Ngong Road in Nairobi, but I swear the wilds are merely an hour's drive away.

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Poi Tech Blog #107: pendulum vs CAP horizontal cateye transitions

Dovetailing both on Noel's interesting take on using isolated pendulums in the pendulum vs CAP hybrid and Ronan's pendulum vs cateye transition using the same pattern, there are patches on either side of this pattern wherein we can enter an iso vs horizontal cateye with minimal effort and the results look damned interesting. One can do this hybrid on each side, but the timing switches to come back to the original pattern are difficult to keep track of.

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Poi Tech Blog #106: pendulum vs. triquetra hybrids and plane-shifts

I started out by trying to figure out how to integrate G-style plane shifts with the ubiquitous triquetra vs pendulum hybrid and realized I'd never played with the other three arrangements of it: pointing the odd petal to either side or down while maintaining the pendulum in the other hand. It led to some odd timings, but did make the plane shifts I'd originally wanted to play with doable. The one with the petal pointed down also seems to integrate well with the same time same direction moves Yuta was showing me at Firedrums. Cool stuff!

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Poi Tech Blog #105: opposites and 1.5 pulseweaves

First up, a short recap of the last video as the audio was of awful quality. Next up, a couple additional variations on the pulseweave concept performed with the poi in opposites or as a 1.5. The opposites one seems to yield line extensions on one side and linear isolations on the other. As for the 1.5s, given that there are four distinct positions each hand can occupy in the course of this move, it also means that there are a possible 16 different combinations for how this move can be performed (both pendulums forward, both pendulums back, one forward and one back, etc).

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Poi Tech Blog #104: pulseweave fountains

Sorry about the audio! Earlier this week, Alien Jon posted a video on a concept he was calling pulseweaves--an intersection between linear extensions and 3-beat weaves. Based upon his idea, I've been playing with a fountain that utilizes the grid we're familiar with playing with from elliptical CAPs. It has a funky side-effect in that moving around it antispin results in extensions in the middle, but moving around it inspin results in antispin petals in the middle.

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Poi Tech Blog #103: antispin toroidal flowers, cont

Okay, I'm really torn on this one having seen the video now. The flower described to me as antispin in the comments section of the last video had an upbeat between two petals and downbeat between two other petals. What I'm performing here is the first geometry I could find that conformed to the shape, but watching it now I think it's just a 2-beat corkscrew performed as a floor-plane flower. The "spiral" based flowers I played with before all had the motion of the poi head oriented at all times on a plane perpendicular to the orientation of the hand.

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Poi Tech Blog Blog #102: are there antispin toroidal flowers?

Having played a little bit more with the concept of toroidal flowers I looked at in #100, I'm beginning to believe that they may lack a distinction between antispin and inspin variants. Specifically, it seems that no matter how I orient the rotation of the poi head to my hand as I turn with them, it results in the same number of downbeats and thus I'm pretty sure the same distance traveled by the poi head.

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