DrexFactor Poi

I'm back from Firedrums and managed to get a lot of footage of the event, though not nearly all the footage that I wanted to capture. One of the classes I really enjoyed was Russ's class on hybrids, though I think the patterns he taught us were actually much closer to being CAPs. Here are the patterns from that class--enjoy! :)

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Yuta lights up at the first night of Firedrums 2010. A few guests pop by for some fun, but all told it's a pretty clean shot of him from start to finish.

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East coast represent! Here's Dale working his doubles on Saturday night at Firedrums 2010.

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Chris "Rovo" Bailey tearing it up in the circle at Firedrums 2010 Saturday night.

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Not the best angle, but also not bad given how much the crowd was moving. This was Ronan's second burn after I made it to the circle Saturday night at Firedrums 2010.

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Before I take off for Firedrums for the week, I wanted to post a little tech bit I got the inspiration for last week. We take G's hybrid stall out of the C-CAP as the root of a plane shift into CAPs behind the back and head. Arms are same-time opposites and poi are split-time same direction. Done cleanly I think this would make for a real eye-popping stunt and it sets up perfectly for returning to the original C-CAP in wheel plane.

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I thought I would mark the occasion of having been spinning poi for 3 years with some fire, glow, and a flow practice I did on the beach in St. Thomas. :)

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Unfortunately I missed the first minute and a half of this as it dawned on me that I should record Yuta's performance as well as sit agape watching it in awe, but I still managed to catch some highlights. This was an awesome routine and I'm really glad I caught any of it.

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In a strange bit of zeitgeist, I ran cross the same idea from two different poi spinners who I'm relatively sure had never spoken of the idea between each other this past weekend while I was in San Francisco. When dealing with 4-sided polygons in spinning, as one tends to with antispin flowers, elliptical CAPs, and any 9-square theory items, you wind up with two similar but difficult to transition between patterns: box and diamond mode. If we expand these out to octagonal figures, however, the issues switching between modes diminishes significantly in complexity.

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I've spent a bunch of time playing with the CAP vs BTH static spin hybrid this past week and realizing the transitions in and out of it are vastly easier than I thought. In fact, one can make a very cool and clean looking transition from either extension or antispin in the direction of the poi straight into this combo and back out. In particular, I like the way this works with opposites split-time.

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