Teddy brought me this challenge a couple weeks ago in New York City--turning with one-handed 1.5s. It took a lot of work and there's a lot of places where it can tangle terribly, but hopefully the end result is close enough for government work ;)

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This was a fun move I was taught at the Wesleyan Winter Fire Arts retreat last weekend in Midtown, Connecticut. One can think of it as being somewhat similar to both Supermans and Fantastic Fours, but uses a very different timing. Part of the fun here is the combo that leads into it, which has several steps and looks more difficult and complex than it really is.

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Chris Kelly does this really nifty 3-poi trick that I edited into the Top 10 video for this year where he does a CAP going one way and a point iso vs extension going the other way. His version has a CAP in the opposite hand, but I found I could synchronize this trick with a static spin to create some lovely tribrid lines. Demonstrated here in both opposites and same direction.

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It's impossible to overstate how silly a move this is--performing barrel rolls with a 3-beat superman! Here's the basic idea: take one half of a normal barrel roll and one half of a 2-beat weave and you can get a bit of a barrel roll to work with the superman. It's not a full barrel roll, unfortunately (don't know if that's even possible with a superman), but it is entertaining to try ;) Beware tangles!

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A few people have been asking about this move in the online poi forums over the past couple months--Zan shows off a version of it in the Arizona Transmission video, but as of yet I wasn't aware of much other work being done on it in the wider community. Yesterday I managed to get the move down fairly consistently (at the cost of the callouses in between my ring finger and pinkie :-/) and was happy to find that the method I've been teaching to learn Zan's Diamond in my Fundamentals of Tech class totally works for the one-handed version, too.

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Spent a bunch of time working on this at Burning Man and Tahoe and finally have something worth seeing! Turning with a 3-beat superman is an interesting challenge because it frequently requires a type of counter rotation that can kill the momentum of the poi and therefore the move. Here are some tips on how to get around these problems--also, it was filmed in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life :)

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This was one move from Kate and Keith's 3-poi video that I found particularly confusing given that all the poi were the same color, so puzzling out which poi was doing what couldn't happen until I saw someone else doing the same move in real life. That guy was my friend Willow, who showed me the technique you see in the video for putting this move together. It bears a lot of similarities to Nicky Evers' wavy weaves and requires a knowledge of thumb-led reverse meteor 2-beats.

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An awesome connect the dots moment! Previously on my tech blog we played around with the idea of doing 3-beat weaves with supermans. We can apply this same idea to flowers by turning the superman into a body-traced 4-petal antispin flower or 2-petal inspin flower. You can then combine it with the other hand to get either a pair of antispins or a hybrid flower along the lines of VTG tech!

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When I did my tutorial on 3 poi weaves a couple weeks ago, I thought the waistwrap would be switching between thumb led and poi led, but at Wildfire I was shown it's much easier to keep the move in thumb led when making this turn. It feels a little awkward to me, but makes up for it in making the move smoother overall and this effect really comes across in the 360 degree turns you do with it.

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Last weekend at Wildfire I taught at 3-poi class that essentially turned into a skill share and one of the cooler things I saw during said skill share was Noel showing us how to do a 3-beat weave with a superman. It's not hard to get there and it sets up both the possibility of doing the weave as an atomic as well as a 4-beat variant. I don't know if a 5-beat is possible, but it would sure be a challenge!

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