Two more fundamental components of horizontal stacking explored here: the cateye and the point isolation. Neither of these moves is very stable and both require a little big of fudging to line up perfectly with the other poi, but there's still some cool applications for using them both--especially in the last pattern outlined here. Sorry about the uninspired music choice, though...it's nearly 1:30 AM and I just don't feel like digging through my music collection for something else :-P

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This will probably wrap up the new tech from the Wesleyan event--this is a move Charlie dropped on Saturday that I thought looked really cool. This is a CAP vs cateye hybrid performed in such a way that each hand performs a single beat simultaneously, such that it takes two cateyes to equal one CAP. Charlie's version is more of a linear extension, which fits well into things like an 8-step CAP or Zan's diamond. Here it is demoed as more of a cateye, which fits well with a split-opposites antispin flower and a nifty transition using split opposites cateyes across the middle.

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This is a trick inspired by Tim Goddard's recent video posting to the Facebook Tech Poi Group. In it, he switches his pendulum and CAP hands using an isolation out of what would otherwise be a spot where you could insert a cateye vs isolated pendulum. In an online chat, we discussed the possibilities of working off the extension rather than antispin to go into isolated split-opposites. The spacing also sets us up to be able to do horizontal cateye vs isolation or just go into any number of isolation-based tricks.

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When I was experimenting with timing and direction changes using the quarter-time stall pattern Poiboi used in his holiday performance video, I ran across a way to elevate CAP vs pendulum but got stuck when I realized I didn't have a good way to move it back down to its normal height. After playing with it for a couple weeks, I have a couple different approaches for doing this now--one involves going into a static vs extension hybrid off of the arc of the CAP and the other involves a very tricky iso vs cateye combo off the antispin section of the CAP.

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In New York I had a funky breakthrough wherein I realized I could stick a horizontal cateye vs iso hybrid on either end of the horizontal stall stacking move Charlie came up with based upon Mel's pattern at Wildfire. Knowing this, I tied together a bunch of threads from the past couple months using moves that all incorporate this hybrid and thus treat it as a transition tool to get between them. Some cool things came out of playing with this.

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On Halloween weekend I got to spend some quality time spinning with some of my favorite spinners on the East Coast. One of them, Baz, came up with this funky move, which I recorded and edited into a video of our fun that day. A few people have asked how it's accomplished--it's essentially a 1.5 weave with a horizontal cateye substituted for a static spin. You can perform this either by having the poi head drop below the other poi head midway through the horizontal cateye, or complete the cateye to keep the move within the unit circle.

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Had a chat with Noel on the Facebook Tech Poi group last week about cateye vs pendulum hybrids, more specifically those involving hand orbits rather than head orbits and wanted to try and find a way to perform the former given that I could already do the latter. Here is what came out: the idea is that you're performing two unit circles side-to-side and alternating which hand is performing them as a cateye and which hand is performing them as a pendulum.

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Christian posted a challenge on the Facebook Tech Poi group this past week asking for CAP vs cateye hybrid possibilities. Never one to back down from a challenge, I started working through it. I'll admit I haven't found anything yet that I feel is really that aesthetically pleasing, but here's what came out nonetheless.

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A bit of tech I started playing with at Firedrums that I'd totally forgotten about. After taking Ronan's Constructs class at FD, I started playing with a few of the patterns to see what hybrids were accessible from soft transitions out of the "constructs" he showed off. Here are the first two I found--both are iso vs. horizontal cateye antibrids that come out of pendulum hybrids performed a unit circle distance apart. I tried the first move in the latest Vulcan tech blog, but it was messy as hell. Here's what it looks like cleaned up.

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The last day at Firedrums, Alien Jon, Yuta, and I were playing with a pattern I could not for the life of me get: it's a switch that Ronan does between adjacent pendulum vs. CAP hybrids using a move in the middle I couldn't make out (he does it at 3:09 of his BJC performance video). After a couple weeks of futzing with it, I found the solution quite on accident--the middle move is cateye vs pendulum, a bizarre hybrid Ronan taught in one of his classes at Firedrums.

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