plane-bending

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #328: Thinking outside the box with plane bending

Trying to think about plane-bending in a different context than toroids and harmonics--like using them as a way to switch direction on a particular trick. The concept reminds me a bit of Nicky Evers' wavy weaves.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #324: Box mode plane-bent Zan's diamond

Based on some of Tracy Wilhelm's work on plane bending Zan's Diamond, here is the full pattern built in box mode, with the traverses through the middle being on diagonals rather than straight up and down. Thanks for the inspiration, Tracy!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #315: Folding cross-points

The culmination of a lot of work on aiming cross points (sorry about the audio!). Basically, you can think of a cross point for any given manifold move as being something like a hinge that you can move this way and that. One of the side-effects of this is that you can create weave-like movements that feature odd plane bends but overall behave the same way as the original move you're working from. Here are a couple examples of some moves derived from the good ol' 3-beat weave.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #268: Toroid hexagrams

I've demonstrated the unicursal hexagram on this blog before, but it's only been recently that I've been able to perform a more regular hexagram--the type that looks like a Star of David with a pair of overlapping triangles. Here are two approaches to making it. One has one point up and one down and the other has the points out to the side.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #265: Toroids for the audience

This past week at Spin Summit, I noticed Kyle Ford from Chicago doing a really cool toroid-inspired move that struck me as a great use of the technique that was simple and eloquent and would jump out to an audience quite easily. Here's an adaptation of the technique, slightly techie-fied, of course ;)

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #262: Diagonal buzzsaw weave

Taking elements of a plane-bending move frequently performed by Arashi and Alien Jon, I noticed that this diagonal-planed move had some elements of a weave to it and thought to take this type of movement into a more buzzsaw or notcoleman weave place. Essentially this involves taking the vertical part of the movement and switching it from being on the native side to the non-native side.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #247: Split (and same) time opposites Zan's diamond toroids

A challenge from Jeffrey Bird on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook--he wanted to see Zan's diamond rendered in opposites split-time in toroids. It took a little bit of doing, but I actually think it's far cleaner than the split-time same direction version I demoed a couple weeks ago. Bonus: I also decided to demo the same-time opposites version of the pattern.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #233: Toroid H stalls

A follow-up from the toroid H concept from a couple weeks ago. This takes the same concept, but makes the toroid a ball instead of planet mode toroid and creates a cool stalling pattern out of it. Short but sweet--it's cold out there!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #232: Pentagram vs plane-bent pentagram atomic hybrid

This is a challenge that comes courtesy Dave "Honeybear" Foregger. While I was in Boston, he showed me a pentagram vs pentagram hybrid he'd been working on and it set my gears turning. It's a similar challenge to triangle vs triquetra, but the trochoid pentagram must travel much faster to stay in phase with the plane-bent variant, so synchronizing their movements can be a pain. This is also a great use of crane position done in different orientations.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #228: Plane-bent Zan's diamond

Some more fun toroid action based upon last week's work. It dawned on me as I was writing out the description for my video last week that many of the patterns we make with poi come down to creating trochoid derivatives of polygons our hands are nominally tracing out--but what if we used plane-bends to describe these shapes rather than creating the trochoids. Here I take this idea and apply it to Zan's diamond. Interestingly enough it takes a body through both directions of a buzz saw in vertical and horizontal plane.

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