DrexFactor Poi

Corey (whose birthday it was this particular night) sasses up some fans for an enthusiastic audience Saturday night at Spring Wildfire 2010.

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Noel and Jordan from the Vulcan crew bust out some partner poi, including composites, partner weaves, and partner flowers Saturday night at Spring Wildfire 2010.

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Kate whips out the doubles for lovely set Saturday night at Spring Wildfire 2010.

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I've been playing some more with the same time same direction patterns Yuta was showing off at Firedrums and trying to apply the concept to stacking patterns. While technically none of these are true stacks, they share some similarities in concept in how the hands change orientation in relation to each other. Going a bit down the rabbit-hole, here is a pattern that essentially amounts to performing a stack in all four directions and alternating between an antispin and extension transition to do it.

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The last day at Firedrums, Alien Jon, Yuta, and I were playing with a pattern I could not for the life of me get: it's a switch that Ronan does between adjacent pendulum vs. CAP hybrids using a move in the middle I couldn't make out (he does it at 3:09 of his BJC performance video). After a couple weeks of futzing with it, I found the solution quite on accident--the middle move is cateye vs pendulum, a bizarre hybrid Ronan taught in one of his classes at Firedrums.

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This blog is going to be on something a little different: hardware. For most of the past year I've used rubber feet as the handles for my fire poi with some form of string connecting them to the swivels in my chains. It's worked pretty well, but I've been worried about the strings I started with (shoe laces) breaking or catching on fire, so I tried using colecord instead. While the colecord was ridiculously comfortable, it's also the least resilient material I've used thus far. After only a month and a half, my current cords are already fraying.

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I had a lot of footage from Firedrums that I couldn't get into the video I made last week, so I'm going to post a couple of the things that wound up on the editing room floor this week. Here is Alien Jon teaching a crowd of eager onlookers (including myself) how to create 6-petal antispin flowers out of pieces we're familiar with from box and diamond mode antispin flowers.

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Here is a video retrospective of Firedrums this year featuring some of my favorite artists: Marvin, Yuta, Annetta, Valery, Adam, Kate, Noel, Memory, Bliss, Tash, Brecken, Thomas, Fyn, and many many more. Hopefully the utter thrill and joy of this event comes across here. Sorry for its tardiness--I had tried to edit it as a tech blog but found it worked infinitely better this way.

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Another move from this year's Firedrums. Kate from Florida came up with this one, that takes the old stall chase exercise and adds a twist to it by switching between the stall chase and a split-time opposites stall. It reminds me a bit of another variant on the stall chasing that Mel does, but has a rather unique flair that I dig. Enjoy! :)

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My last day at Firedrums I got in a one-on-one geeking session with Yuta and he showed me this lovely number. It's funky because it utilizes a type of spinning that we usually train ourselves out of very early on as poi spinners--same time same direction. Yuta's been playing with using this to create funky hybrid flowers similar to the type that Cyrille does with split-time same direction. This also evidently is where the static spin BTH vs CAP hybrid comes from. Enjoy!

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