The final installment of our first beginners series: in this one we'll take what we know about turning and tick-tacks and apply them to turns between wheel and wall plane in all the different timing and direction combinations. Once you've mastered each of these positions, you can easily flow between them as you perform.

turnspt3.mp4

This is the first entry of an experiment: doing tutorials on very basic level poi tricks for people just starting out. No tech to be found here, but if you've either just picked up your first set of poi or are a rote beginner, you may find something of value in these tutorials. In this first series, we're going to tackle basic hip reel turns. Tune in every Friday for the next three weeks to learn the basics of these types of movement.

turnspt1.mp4

A couple weeks ago, I'd done a tech blog on no-beat (sneaky) throws and a weave that one can perform using them. One of my commenters pointed out that there was a variant I hadn't covered and when I was in New York a couple weeks ago, Ted showed me the component I was missing: each hand has a no-beat throw on the up-beat, so you can actually perform that weave in such a way that every beat but the cross beat becomes a throw. It's hell hard but I think it also looks hell cool :)

techblog222.mp4

There's been some chat in the past week about zero points and how they differentiate from plane bends and even whether they do so at all. Here's my take on the concept (which, rarely enough for poi seems to be very internally logical ;) and how one can think of plane changing as being something of a sliding scale where on one end the poi stops moving (zero point) and on the other the hand stops moving (orbing).

techblog215.mp4

More throws for your consumption--this time a type of toss I've heard both Erik and Ted refer to as a "sneaky toss". It's something like a float throw but performed in such a way that it seems to continue a static or small extension motion, rather than requiring a loop like isolated or overhead tosses. It's an integral component in a type of toss weave I've seen Poiboi do in his videos and a fun sneaky toss switch that G showed me while he was in town. I think his version finished differently, but I like the properties the version I'm doing here has.

techblog212.mp4

Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

techblog189.mp4

A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.

techblog184.mp4

Part 2 in my series on beginner level inversion and introversion play. Last video we practiced individual elements of these moves and here we combine them together--first by taking any 2 together, then all 3, then a funky fountain variant that utilizes the type that seems like an airwrap or hyperloop. There's plenty more fun down this well, so be sure to check out some of Alien Jon, Ky Lee, Christian, and Baz's videos for more inverted goodness.

techblog180.mp4

I've finally taken the plunge and have begun to attack one of those techniques in the poi world that I've spent the past four years avoiding like the plague: inversions and introversions. I don't fully understand the difference just yet, but having seen some really innovative work come out of this technique in the past few years from Insignia, Charlie, Alien Jon, and Ky I decided it was time to learn :) Here are some very basic elements of these movements to begin drilling that will add up to some more complex patterns in my next video.

techblog179.mp4

This tutorial examines body tracers from the vantage point of thinking of them as two-beat weaves that shift position along the body and starts with a couple basic exercises and the theory behind them and moves into a few examples of the technique in action.

bodytracertutorial.mp4