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.
Took at little while to finalize all the details, but I'm proud to announce my winter 2012 poi workshop tour! In the next three months I'll be visiting, Boston, Springfield (Missouri, not Illinois), and Atlanta!
While I was in Boulder, Alien Jon and I spent an evening playing around with some movements based around creating right angles with inspin stalls and pendulums. Here are a couple variants we played with and a couple transitions one can use to get in and out of them.
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 :)
Shortest tech blog ever! A fun little variant on the split-time same direction stack I've played with before on this blog. Turns out it has more spaces to insert new movements than I'd really considered before and it leads to a nifty compound stack that reminds me of some stuff I've seen Charlie do.
Last weekend as Ted and I played around in the Dube showroom in Manhattan, he showed me this nifty use for a toss forward over the shoulder. I'd seen Ronan doing this toss on the playa but hadn't yet thought of a good use for it, but Ted pointed out that one could then catch the poi head in cradle and the direction of the handle would continue in the direction to initiate a contact roll down the back of the forearm. The catch for this is exceptionally difficult, but I really like the result. Enjoy! :)
I know this topic has been done to death, but in trying to come up with a way to classify toroids, I came to realize we've barely scratched the surface of them. Here I use the approach of imagining the axes around which we can move the plane of a toroid as being similar to the major axes inside an octahedron and choosing specific axes that are parallel with the arm, hand path, or neither.
This past weekend I had the great fortune of collaborating on what I think is one of my favorite projects of the year. I wanted to throw out a little postmortem on the project for folks who may want to understand how it came about and why four tech spinners got together for the utterly insane goal of creating three and a half minutes of choreography in 10 hours over two nights in New York City.
