DrexFactor Poi

It started out innocently enough...Leo had been playing with ways to stall his hands and poi together at Firedrums and Mel had included a funky move that did the same thing in his seminal "Red Pants" video.

Another trick from Poiboi's latest performance video...this one is by far my favorite. It's a forearm roll where one switches from the inside of the forearm to the outside of the forearm, essentially doubling the area the poi head rolls across. It incorporates elements of what feels to me like a fishtail as well as two forearm rolls I've demoed on here before.

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Two more fundamental components of horizontal stacking explored here: the cateye and the point isolation. Neither of these moves is very stable and both require a little big of fudging to line up perfectly with the other poi, but there's still some cool applications for using them both--especially in the last pattern outlined here. Sorry about the uninspired music choice, though...it's nearly 1:30 AM and I just don't feel like digging through my music collection for something else :-P

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This will probably wrap up the new tech from the Wesleyan event--this is a move Charlie dropped on Saturday that I thought looked really cool. This is a CAP vs cateye hybrid performed in such a way that each hand performs a single beat simultaneously, such that it takes two cateyes to equal one CAP. Charlie's version is more of a linear extension, which fits well into things like an 8-step CAP or Zan's diamond. Here it is demoed as more of a cateye, which fits well with a split-opposites antispin flower and a nifty transition using split opposites cateyes across the middle.

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Another fun trick that came out of the retreat in Connecticut, Charlie on that Saturday night pulled out a fun box-mode move that utilized inspin and antispin stalls to define the corners of the box. I added a V vs. V transition to switch which corner the action was focused on and Charlie suggested using it as a setup for making a horizontal switch. We use this combo to create at 3D composite where we switch positions in the Wesleyan video.

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For a while now I've been wanting to use my video blog to document elements of fire culture as I travel and meet people. This is my first attempt to do so: last weekend I went up to Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT for their Prometheus Club's Winter Fire Arts Festival for some epic geekage and workshops. Here are some of the highlights of the weekend as well as a brief interview with the two ladies who made me coming there possible.

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I spent the weekend hanging out with some of my very favorite spinners at Wesleyan University's Winter Fire Arts Festival. While there, Insignia suggested to me that I try horizontal stacks in atomic planes and a funky boxing pattern emerged. I realize before long that depending on the type of stack I was doing, that I could then plane shift out of it and resolve to a more familiar move. Thanks for the suggestion, Christian!

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It's been a long time since I've uploaded a real flow performance video, so I thought I'd make the MLK Day vid an annual tradition. It is not nearly as warm this January in DC as it was last year, so my hands were pretty icy by the end of this, but overall I'm pretty happy with the results. Some fun tech from the past few months in here and some shivery attempts to add some more body movement into it--enjoy!

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A couple months ago I posted a tutorial on plane-changing that was heavily focused on vertical plane-shifts. Lately I've been playing with a couple exercises that have really been helping to nail down the stuff in floor plane and thought I'd share them. Enjoy!

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Just an experiment...editing my video instead of doing it as a single take. Please leave feedback and let me know what y'all think of doing it this way. Anys, today on the Poi Theory Group on Facebook, there was a fascinating discussion over horizontal stacking patterns and Leo (leospoi) lent us some of his expertise. He's been thinking of abbreviating the elements of these tricks with single letters to as a mnemonic device to make different combinations. With that in mind, here are three homogeneous patterns, three hybrids, and one possible CAP based upon this breakdown.

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