DrexFactor Poi

At PDF, Joe Graff showed me a most fascinating move he'd been working on ever since he saw Pineapple Pete and G's video "The Airwrap Reloaded" in which the two posit that the airwrap is the oldest type of plane bend in poi. Taking a cue from this, Joe used an airwrap to plane bend into planes that were 90 degrees offset, resulting in an atomic. I found that with a little tweaking, this same combo could be used to reverse the direction of the airwrap as well.

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Ironically I've been running across a lot of tricks lately that involve airwrap transitions, so I'm making it a theme of the coming week. Here are two such moves: one that was theorized but not performed at Wildfire involves catching the poi in the shoulder and hand cradle that Marvin demonstrated at Burning Man, but then catching it in an airwrap when throwing it back out. Ted and I tried unsuccessfully to pull this move off on Friday night, but I've figured out the trick to make it work.

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A lesson on plane shifting including basic components, building blocks, and a few examples. In honor of a departed member of the poi community.

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At Wildfire, Charlie and Baz came up with an interesting pattern that switches between right angles similar to some stacking patterns Ronan demonstrated earlier this year. I noticed that one side-effect of the pattern was that it forced the poi head to follow the length of the leash when switching positions, and started looking for other patterns that exhibited this same characteristic. Here is the first one that I've found.

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I got a lot of emails and comments last week asking me about a trick I had done during my performance at Wildfire's performance class last Sunday, specifically the one I'd done at roughly 2:30 in it. Here is an explanation of the move--it's a variant on Charlie's 8-step CAP pattern used as a transition between same time same direction hybrids and the wall plane antispin flower that's really a pair of triquetras that I tend to overuse frequently in performances. It's not earth-shattering, but I like the effect of it :)

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Over the weekend at Wildfire, we played around some more with Mel's top stall vs. pendulum pattern from the "Red Pants" video. Charlie found an interesting inversion of it wherein the leading hand performs a float rather than a topstall, making the internal alignment on each side a hand to poi relationship rather than hand to hand, thus allowing you to drop out of the move into static spin vs extension or a host of other moves. Even better, it's totally easy to switch between both variants.

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With only a few days to work on it, I pulled this performance together for Wildfire's Performance Class on Sunday night. There were a couple rough spots, but ultimately I think it was a decent routine for the prep time I had.

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Charlie, Ted, Erik, and I took to the practice field Saturday night to break out a few 4 person patterns. It was a bear and a half to get them synchronized, but when we got them they looked positively amazing.

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Ted and Charlie play off some awesome tunneling/composite moves at Fall Wildfire 2010.

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One of those utter WTF moments when someone shows you something that blows your mind. Ted figured out a bunch of contact moves for buugeng. I can't wait to see him string a bunch of these together.

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