DrexFactor Poi

Dovetailing both on Noel's interesting take on using isolated pendulums in the pendulum vs CAP hybrid and Ronan's pendulum vs cateye transition using the same pattern, there are patches on either side of this pattern wherein we can enter an iso vs horizontal cateye with minimal effort and the results look damned interesting. One can do this hybrid on each side, but the timing switches to come back to the original pattern are difficult to keep track of.

techblog107.mp4

I started out by trying to figure out how to integrate G-style plane shifts with the ubiquitous triquetra vs pendulum hybrid and realized I'd never played with the other three arrangements of it: pointing the odd petal to either side or down while maintaining the pendulum in the other hand. It led to some odd timings, but did make the plane shifts I'd originally wanted to play with doable. The one with the petal pointed down also seems to integrate well with the same time same direction moves Yuta was showing me at Firedrums. Cool stuff!

techblog106.mp4

First up, a short recap of the last video as the audio was of awful quality. Next up, a couple additional variations on the pulseweave concept performed with the poi in opposites or as a 1.5. The opposites one seems to yield line extensions on one side and linear isolations on the other. As for the 1.5s, given that there are four distinct positions each hand can occupy in the course of this move, it also means that there are a possible 16 different combinations for how this move can be performed (both pendulums forward, both pendulums back, one forward and one back, etc).

techblog105.mp4

Sorry about the audio! Earlier this week, Alien Jon posted a video on a concept he was calling pulseweaves--an intersection between linear extensions and 3-beat weaves. Based upon his idea, I've been playing with a fountain that utilizes the grid we're familiar with playing with from elliptical CAPs. It has a funky side-effect in that moving around it antispin results in extensions in the middle, but moving around it inspin results in antispin petals in the middle.

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Okay, I'm really torn on this one having seen the video now. The flower described to me as antispin in the comments section of the last video had an upbeat between two petals and downbeat between two other petals. What I'm performing here is the first geometry I could find that conformed to the shape, but watching it now I think it's just a 2-beat corkscrew performed as a floor-plane flower. The "spiral" based flowers I played with before all had the motion of the poi head oriented at all times on a plane perpendicular to the orientation of the hand.

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Having played a little bit more with the concept of toroidal flowers I looked at in #100, I'm beginning to believe that they may lack a distinction between antispin and inspin variants. Specifically, it seems that no matter how I orient the rotation of the poi head to my hand as I turn with them, it results in the same number of downbeats and thus I'm pretty sure the same distance traveled by the poi head.

techblog102.mp4

This past weekend at the PEX Summer Festival, Noel showed me this bitchin' pattern wherein one uses an isolated pendulum on the end of a pendulum vs. CAP antibrid to switch the orientation of the hand to poi lineup. This opens the door for some switches into hybrids, some point isolation switches, and even an inverted pattern based upon one that Charlie was playing with at Wildfire. There's more patterns to be found in here!

techblog101.mp4

If you live in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and haven't heard of PEX, you owe it to yourself to check them out at some point. It's essentially a collective of creatives who live and operate out of Philly and throw some of the most amazing Burning Man inspired parties you'll ever see. Last year they started an event that is a hybrid of a music festival and a burn that takes place in Northern Maryland over the 4th of July weekend and I was delighted to return to it this year.

Hooray! Lucky number 100! There have been some awesome tricks and some awful ones...some weeks when I had no idea what to post and some when I physically couldn't record enough video for all the ideas I had. Through it all I really have appreciated all the support and encouragement from the larger community out there. Thanks so much for tuning in, challenging me, learning, and teaching me!

techblog100.mp4

I've got to confess that as much as partner poi has blown up over the course of the past year, I've yet to really see much of the appeal of it. Like degrees of twist, there comes to be a point where the more intricate the movements involved in it, the less graceful and more unnatural it comes off (and therefore, to my mind, the less entertaining to an uninitiated audience).