A fun move Keith Marshall came up with at IgNight--simple and yet quite elegant. The essential elements are to take vertically displaced hands working in split-opposites and use an extension and float to suggest a moment of split-time same direction before dropping the previously top hand via float into a static spin down below. Ronan, Thomas, and I all totally swooned for this when Keith came up with it.

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I started playing with this trick earlier in the week...it incorporates elements of the quarter-time floats/stalls that Poiboi and Mel have been using, but drops in and out of a horizontal cateye vs isolation antibrid at each end. I've been sticking pendulum vs CAPs in the same spot and figured I would just skip the middle figure. I like that it has an interesting start-stop dynamic to it.

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I got a request on my recent video on the horizontal cateye vs CAP hybrid to describe how I was doing a pair of horizontal cateyes that I was using to switch side to side on the aforementioned hybrid. Here they are demoed--essentially they're a pair of cateyes performed in split time opposites and can easily be thought of as being a pair of floats in which then hands and poi heads switch orientation as they go back and forth. It's a little tricky because the planes the cateyes operate in are at a slight angle to each other.

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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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Sorry about the audio quality! Last week Poiboi uploaded a video of a performance he did in Israel that was pretty kickass and also seemed to be a kind of an update on a performance he did earlier in the year at EJC. One of the changes he did was changing a switch from CAP vs pendulum to quarter-time stalls to CAP vs pendulum going the other way to using quarter-time floats as the transition.

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A couple contact tricks from Burning Man that Marvin taught me the last day on the playa. The first is a really cool float throw to cradle and catching the handle on the shoulder before tossing the poi out and catching the handle again. It seems to me like this one is crying out for some uber-cool last step. Anybody have any ideas? The next trick is a Ronan move, catching the head on the shoulder and sending the handle flinging around horizontally to catch it again behind the back.

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Remember that funky thing I played with last week that combined elements of CAPs, floats, stalls, and extensions? Well I put it into wallplane and found that just like it's wheelplane cousin, it opens up the doors to lots of transitions to wallplane CAPs, antispins, plane-shifts, and more. This pattern is reminding me more and more of Charlie's concept of totipotent patterns that can switch between timing and direction combinations.

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While I was in Africa, I started playing with a funky pattern wherein one makes like they're going to do a CAP after 3/4 of an extension circle only to use the antispin petal as a stall and pull back out of it into a float. Putting it together with both hands results in a pattern that has some CAP-like qualities but ends in each hand and poi head being pointed straight out from center, opening up some interesting possibilities for transitions.

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This blog starts off with a demo of a 5-beat behind the back waistwrap that is still awkward and sloppy but I'm noticing I'm reaching for it in my BTB weaves now. Next is some explorations of the use of Yuta stalls to create horizontal flowers by stalling into an inversion rather than outswing as one usually does with this type of plane-bending. There's also some theory here as to how to use the Rastaxel stall shift pattern to create octagonal planes and finally a very special shout-out and a couple pieces of tech courtesy Mike Icon.

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