DrexFactor Poi

Windmills are a fun variant on two-beat weaves that you do around your head. They're great for level-changing among other things. He's the best technique I know for learning them--it also gives you some of the basic motor skills that go into a lot of other moves around the head.

windmilltutorial.mp4

Based upon a move in the last Timmehtek video--a nifty switch to quarter time that makes use of a horizontal body tracer. It reminds me a bit of Mel's horizontal SNES move from last week and made me realize that as tech spinners when we tend to plane-break away from the body we have another option open to us. We avoid breaking toward the body for obvious reasons, but integrating this type of transition with a body tracer can have a really cool effect.

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This is a tutorial on how to take some of the tricks we used last week in creating our forwards 3-beat weave and apply them to learning the same trick in reverse. As an added bonus, included are steps to learning how to turn between forwards and reverse 3-beat weaves. A friend of mine had pointed out that frequently the reverse 3-beat can be as difficult to learn as the forwards one because one has to switch around the arrangement of pieces in a way that seems almost upside-down.

rev3beatweave.mp4

I got a request a few months ago for a tutorial on this trick--it's basically a 4-beat corkscrew with some elements of body tracing thrown in for good measure. Not too terribly difficult when you break it into component bits, but it involves the body in ways that are hella cool to watch.

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When I first saw people doing this, I totally thought this was one of those tricks I'd just let pass me by. Then Kate put out her video of epic awesomeness and I decided I had to add this one to my arsenal. This is an epically difficult move, be forewarned!

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I got inspired to write this today...hopefully you all don't think it's too preachy of me. These are the ideas that inform my own approach to spinning and I think they bear sharing:

1. Learn at least a little bit of everything, even if you think it's silly. Especially if you think it's silly. I can just about guarantee that the technique you think looks sloppy and awful today will produce something in a few months that looks like magic to you and you'll have to go back and learn the basics anyway.

There have to be a million tutorials on how to do this move, but this past weekend in Atlanta I had a breakthrough teaching a student that I wanted to share with you all. I really hate teaching the 3-beat weave because I think that for a "beginner" move it's quite complex and really requires a large amount of physical coordination. Nevertheless, here are two approaches to learning it that I've found to be effective. Incidentally, I'm sorry about the poor focus--I didn't realize there was an issue till I'd gotten the footage home to edit :-P

3beatweave.mp4

Here's a move that came out of a skill exchange I had over the weekend with Charles Hinton in Atlanta. He showed me a nifty pendulum-based move that was designed to teach BTB air wraps. I didn't have a lot of luck with the pattern as he'd laid it out, but I decided to work out a different approach to air wraps behind the back and have had some limited successes.

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I'm wrapping up the poi flower series with this vid on antispin. Antispin could really be its own video series entirely, so I'm just giving a couple different approaches to creating antispin petals in this video and letting people take the exercises used in the previous videos in this series to extrapolate the different timing and direction combinations. If you'd like to see a full series on antispin, please let me know!

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Something a little different: I've been trying to come up with some bite-sized chunks of how my work in modern dance has been informing my poi spinning these past few months and here's a small but easy to learn bit that involves teaching your body core to move around in a circle in a way that interacts with your arms in very interesting ways.

techblog236.mp4