DrexFactor Poi

As much as I bitch about the process of it, it's nights like last night that remind me why I do in fact love conclave. After a late afternoon runthrough of our full choreo, the PDF conclave buckled down at DC's Artomatic to film our submission for Burning Man this year.

Dyami started up this thread on Tribe about two weeks ago: http://techpoi.tribe.net/thread/37590299-0963-4197-befb-3d7fbcf007ce

In it, he's taking Alien Jon's concept of the unit circle and pondering whether it can be applied to 3D geometry to create a similar family of moves that work within the path of a sphere.

More fun with Yuta stalls! Specifically, it turns out that they work just as well with floats as they do with top and bottom stalls, opening the door to doing them in tandem with isolations, extensions, hybrids and cateyes. Also, some more footwork and danciness inspired by nightanddaydance's excellent response to my last blog. Had to trim a couple tricks out to keep it under 10 minutes, but they should be making an appearance in a later blog.

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It's my dirty little secret that I've been working my ass off on my stalls to make those Yuta-style plane shifting stalls cleaner. While I can do them just fine if my right hand is on bottom, when my left hand is on bottom, the horizontal plane wobbles a depressingly wide amount. An interesting exercise I began playing with today was doing a pair of top-stalls, Yuta-stalling behind me, coming out as though in a bottom stall, bottom stall again, Yuta stalling once again, and coming out as though from a top stall, then reversing the whole thing.

After seeing a Nick Woolsey instructional vid on how to do the triquetra the other day, I discovered a figure I really dug under the wikipedia entry for the word triquetra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triquetra) called a Carolingian Cross, which essentially amounts to a compound interlacing triquetra. I've spent a good portion of the week dissecting the figure and trying to figure out how to render it with poi. Here are three of the options I've played with.

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Wow...seriously love this shot, Abject--thanks so much for taking these and for the great conversation on Saturday night! :)

Interesting move combo finds me while I finish up a one-pager on Twitter strategy for work: from same-time opposites do simultaneous top-stalls that stop with the hands right next to each other. Continue the movement of one while isolating the other the opposite direction it just came from, in other words switch to the "split-time" iso vs. extension hybrid with hands together. Playing around after I finish the one-pager shows it's possible, though without a mirror I reckon it's quite sloppy.

Over the weekend I bid a fond farewell to two of my favorite people in the world: Tash Kouri and Sean Stogner. They've been keeping the firespinning community going in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the past four years as they've been finishing up college in between starting a hoop performance troop called the Gyronauts and doing more gigs than I can count.