DrexFactor Poi

This is the first time I've spun when I've spent as much time thinking about what my feet are doing as I did about what my poi were doing. I had a really epic flow session leading up to this and there's some laughably bad moments, but overall I feel like this is just as interesting to watch as some of my techier videos but in a very different sort of way.

footwerk12912.mp4

The experiment continues! This is a series on how to do poi flowers. This week we're starting with basic inspin flower petal placement--how to train your body to find the four compass points of a 4-petal inspin and how to create both 2-petal and 4-petal flowers. Next week we'll talk about how to use both hands to create flowers together.

flowerspt1.mp4

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.

techblog228.mp4

Posting a week late, I know...but trust me it was recorded on MLK Day. About ten minutes after I'd gotten off a bus coming home from New York, in fact. The tradition lives on if slightly delayed ;)

mlkday2012.mp4

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 tech blog featuring special guest star Ted Petrosky! We got together for a jam in Brooklyn and he showed me a nifty contact trick that starts with a shotgun-style single hand spiral wrap and it got my gears turning. Here are two fun variants that utilize some other tricks we know and love and that really look cool with this move added in for some extra spice.

techblog226.mp4

This week we go through the basic hip reel turn with our poi in same time, same direction. This teaches a very important concept in poi: when we turn, it appears the direction of poi rotation changes relative to us. Next week we'll go through hip reels in other timing and direction combinations.

turnspt2.mp4

I've found that I've been doing a lot more body tracers of late and it's motivated me to try and find transitions for them that integrate with other moves I know well. One such transition that's working out pretty well is horizontal stacks. Here are a couple transitions using vertical body tracers that set up stacks fairly well and as I discovered while filming also then present an opportunity to switch between different body tracers.

techblog225.mp4

Kind of a fun brain/kinesthetic workout that came out of a trick I've seen G and Ronan do wherein they play 4-petal antispin against a static spin to create hybrid moments at either side of the body. I took that same idea to a vertical place to start, and then placed the top position behind the head to add a body tracer flavor to the overall movement. Don't know if it has any good performance applications but it definitely gives the brain something to chew on :)

techblog224.mp4