Weird Science :: Video Tech Blogs

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #335: Plane bending gets weird

So here's an interesting thing you can do with plane bending: if you displace a 4-petal antispin flower in three dimensions such that it changes plane as it enters and exits a petal, you wind up creating an interesting illusion wherein from one perspective it continues to look like a 4-petal antispin flower but from another it looks like a 2-petal inspin flower. You can use this, then, to create patterns where you're not only spinning a different type of flower from a different perspective, but also a different timing and direction.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #334: Contact Poi Folding Lines Drill

While spending time spinning with Keith Marshall, he strongly implored me to even out my contact tricks--practicing each roll and fold with each hand. He showed me a drill to work out folding lines with each hand, but I realized it only encompassed half a fold. This is my version of the same drill, including the line fold in each direction for each hand.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #333: Infinite folding lines

This is a folding line that Keith Marshall taught me this past weekend as we waited for a bus. It comes from an outer forearm roll that rolls past the shoulder back to cradle, so it sets up the potential of chaining many of the same rolls together for infinite folding lines.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #332: BTH CAP vs CAP

Something I spotted in a video of Ted Petrosky made me think of this--he did a cool body tracer around his shoulders (if memory serves, I've seen Michael Parisi doing the same tracer) and it occurred to me that the top part could be combined with a C-CAP faced downward to create a cool variant on BTH static vs CAP.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #331: Isolated weave

This is one of those moves I've had on the "to-do" list now for a year or two. In the early days of my tech blog, I spent several videos getting the reverse isolated weave down. This is the forwards version. The helpful piece of this puzzle came from Ronan last summer, when he suggested I think of it as being similar to a five-beat weave.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #330: Uses for 1-petal inspin vs static

This is kinda retro tech, but it still leads to some fun places. Using static spin vs 1-petal inspin creates a moment that makes for an easy transition to a split-same isolation. You can use that moment to switch to static spin vs 1-petal inspin with each hand's role reversed or any number of patterns that use linear isolations through the body center.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #329: Timing and direction in Isobend-4 (with poi)

After uploading my vid on isobend hybrids (http://youtu.be/o20Lmbo8nn0), Kory San pointed out to me that there would be at least two variants on each pattern because the isobends can be performed either with the poi always rotating away from the performer or toward. With that in mind, here is a demo of all hand T&D with the poi moving both inward, outward, and both (which in some cases yields movement in split-same and in some cases yields movement in opposites).

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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 #327: BTH Antibrids

A nifty idea picked up from Conway Jennings when he was last in DC--switching the direction of a CAP vs static spin BTH to get different antibrid combinations. It creates the same sort of relationship between hand and poi that CAP vs pendulum does, but with a cool BTH element.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #326: Random staggered time toroid patterns

Just a grab-bag of some random variations of an isobend-4 where I play around a bit with the timing on them, seeing what happens by using split time same direction in them.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #325: What is a probend toroid?

There's been a lot of questions about this on the Facebook Tech Poi Group, so I thought I'd do a video on nothing but what defines probend toroids and how they can be constructed. Think of them as a whole long of two-beat weaves daisy-chained together ;)

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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 #323: Isobend toroid hybrids

Mashing up the isobend-4 toroid with all the even-petalled flowers, here are all timing and direction combinations, including both wheel and wall plane together opposites. For the background on isobend toroids and how they relate to antibend and probend, check out this video here: http://youtu.be/IrS-NdpnEHo

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #322: Toroid Triangle Rhapsody (how to)

Based upon the toroids I uploaded the previous Monday (http://youtu.be/XA5d4yoS97w), here's a long how-to on how you can perform each of them and integrate these toroid triangles into your spinning.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #321: Toroid triangle rhapsody

Inspired by a recent photograph of some really gorgeous toroid triangles put together (https://s3.amazonaws.com/com.offerpop.datastore/276469/UhwaNA.png) I went on a little bit of a quest to put together a bunch of different toroid triangle orientations and found fun ways to integrate them into my spinning in surprising ways, including plane shifting and inversions.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #320: 3/5 Time in Toroid Pentagrams

A few weeks ago, I posted a video showing 3/5 time for antispin pentagrams and now I've (kind of) got it with toroids--the active issue here of course being how you avoid them tangling with each other mid-move. It turns out the recipe for this is to take Arashi's concept of a crane and apply it to each separate set of corners of the toroid.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #318: Wheel plane opposites inversions

As promised: here is a breakdown of how to perform a split-opposites inversion in wheel plane. It's helpful to think of it as the path of the inversion being tilted up and around so that the rules we're used to get reversed for the hand that is going backwards.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #319: Inversions from all Atomic orientations

This is an update on a previous video. Originally I thought that inversions differed from tangles in that they could be entered into from either a tangle or an atom (clash or mesh), but it turns out they can be entered into from any atom. There are stack and crane atom-based inversions as well.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #317: Two-way contact transfers

This is one of those tricks I've seen and lusted after for the past year--I finally had the chance to put in some concerted work on it and it wound up not being as hard as I feared. The most important insight when it comes to this move is realizing that it's essentially a body tracer performed as a contact trick. Once you've got that part down, the rest fits together easily.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #316: 128 Inversions

The confluence of a lot of work in the past few months--here is a systematized method for learning and drilling inversions that covers all wall and wheel plane inversions as well as all the atomic orientations you can get out of a base-8 system of orientation.

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Poi Dancing: Spinning on MLK Day 2013

The tradition continues! Got outside to get some flow on and try out some new ideas on MLK Day in Dupont Circle here in DC.

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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 #314: Antispin no-beat throw weave

In editing Keith Marshall's portion of the Top 10 of 2012 video, I spotted him performing this nifty variant on a no-beat throw weave that utilizes antispin to get the toss from point A to point B and thought it would make for an excellent tech blog! The key to getting this down is to flick the handle up like it's an isolated toss when the under hand comes around to make its throw.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #313: The airwrap cube

An interesting property of wall plane insides that Alien Jon showed to me while I was in Boulder for Christmas: the arms analog to an airwrap is a 4-beat windmill or watermill and in theory this is just a truncated version of a hyperloop/inversion. Jon pointed out to me, though, that when spinning clockwise with the crosspoint pointed down (as it would be in an airwrap), the only watermill one has access to in wall plane has the left hand leading.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #312: H vs V introverted weaves

Performing an introverted weave forces the planes into an atomic configuration, but it got me to wonder if one had the option of choosing what the atomic configuration would be. I went ahead and tried to produce a weave analogous to an introverted weave but in a H vs V  (horizontal versus verticale) arrangement rather than V vs V (vertical versus vertical). The result not only worked wonderfully, but also demonstrated there are two variants on this move: one for each direction the horizontal poi can rotate.

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