DrexFactor Poi

A couple months ago I posted a video using plane-bends to switch between inspin and antispin flowers. G saw the vid and suggested I try the same technique in split-time same direction, so here it is! My right side isn't as clean as my left side, but I still think it's a cool effect. Enjoy!

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For a large portion of the past year, I've had a massive poi mad-on for technique like Ronan McLoughlin's. He's from Cork, Ireland and has one of the most original poi spinning styles I've ever seen. Unlike most poi spinners (myself included), Ronan centers his style around stopping the momentum of the poi rather than keeping it moving, resulting in a dizzying array of stalls, pendulums, and contact work that always leaves me scratching my head.

Sorry about the audio! The mike on my flipcam isn't great, I'm afraid, but hopefully, the ideas I'm playing with here will still come across. I've been working on a way to make the now-cliche stall chase work in horizontal plane and came up with this approach which utilizes plane shifts to give us a brief moment of the poi angles straight out before one or the other has to stall down. Interestingly enough, it also yields a shape that's compatible with the quarter-time stall chasing patterns I showed off a couple weeks ago.

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Christian (Insignia) posted a series of images to his Facebook profile last week detailing a few diagrams wherein a body could transition between triquetras and cateyes in a variety of really fascinating ways. After playing around with the idea for a little while and realizing it featured a geometric concept called a vesica piscis, I worked out where playing with cateyes and triquetras using the concept could take you. Ironically, the shapes are all axially, but not radially symmetric as Christian's diagrams came out.

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Nick Woolsey and G posted a video today that featured G doing a crazy kind of hybrid stall I'd never seen before. I got to playing with it and here is a fun pattern that came out of it, switching between CAP patterns with a split buzzsaw flower.

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I got a request this past week based upon a mixed transition diagram I'd posted to Facebook for instructions on how to do one of the transitions outlined in it: namely switching from root horizontal cateye to ET vertical cateye. Primarily I'm using gravity to help in this case, but there is a way to snap the poi head vertically to do it as a mixed transition with the hand soft--it's damned hard, though.

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Last week PoiBoi07 posted a great vid with some fun triquetra and cateye hybrids performed with the static/isolating hand behind the head. Here is the same hybrid as well as a couple others I've seen that utilize a similar approach, including extensions and C-CAPs.

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This weekend comes the fruit of weeks worth of labor: my glowspinning troupe, Revolutionary Motion is performing at Contradiction Dance's spring concert. Featuring some of my favorite local spinners: Surprise, E6, Mia, and Maddy, we've worked up a piece incorporating elements of modern dance and hip hop with our tools and we're stoked to be performing this piece in such a fantastic setting.

If you live in the Baltimore/Washington area, please consider attending. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

Had an interesting revelation over the weekend: thus far all the work I've done on the concept of transition theory (hard and soft transitions) has been restricted to 2D epi and hypertrochoid shapes. While playing with a mixed transition CAP pattern over the weekend, I suddenly realized I could repeat the pattern without altering its character by switching to the plane behind me. Technically, such a transition means going to an ET relative to wheel plane, but it behaves like an IT due to conservation of angular momentum.

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It's been a while since I've broken out the doubles! This past weekend a friend and former student showed me an alternate way to perform a split-time opposites antispin flower with doubles that opened the door to figuring out how a couple friends from Virginia Beach are able to do a 6-petal variant of this same move. Basically: you switching from thumbs leading to pinkies leading. Here is a demo and detailed instructions.

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