Weird Science :: Drex's Poi Blog

My tech blog's new home

2009-11-09T15:07:00.000-08:00

I've now officially moved!

My tech blog can now be accessed at http://www.drexfactor.com/weirdscience

If you've been following me on Blogger, I highly recommend you subscribe to me at this new location as I won't be updating this blog from here on out. Thanks, all!

Peace,
Drex

Musings on hybrids and soon to move

2009-10-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

So I know there's been comparatively few updates recently and this has been especially frustrating given that some updates have disappeared in the past couple days as I've tried to work out why my blogger account has stopped feeding videos to my iTunes feed.

The good news is these issues are nearing their end. The bad news is that it means I'm having to transfer all my content over to my own site. This process should be done by the end of the week, but in the meantime has meant I'm cutting and pasting a year's worth of video and written blogs to a different site. It's extremely time-consuming and annoying, but at least I won't have to worry about the technology failing on me and I can expand the content however I see fit.

That aside, Alien Jon recently posted a message on the Home of Poi forums asking for requests for poi tutorials and he's gotten a lot of good responses--one of which stuck out to me in a way I wasn't anticipating.

While I got down all the isolation vs. extension hybrids of the unit circle model months ago, I've been struggling to find an adequate way to describe a good use for them. Indeed, I rarely find I use them in flow spinning at all, though the unit circle grid hints tantalizingly at the potential for the model to offer easy flow between hybrids.

Admittedly, this is a narrow interpretation of the concept, however. After months of trying to understand Olive's post on "hybrid math", a five-minute conversation with him at Firedrums cleared up my confusion and I suddenly realized that hybrids existed in a far greater depth and scope than I had imagined. And it's based upon this understanding that I throw out an interesting idea: what if hybrids can be thought of as the "transition tools" between timing and direction combinations?

One of the fundamental properties all hybrids seem to possess is that they can be viewed as occupying two different timing and direction combinations simultaneously--the standard hybrid of iso vs. extension with hands together can be viewed as either split-time same direction if one continues the motion of the poi or same-time same direction if one continues the motion of the the hands. Likewise, the triquetra polyrhythm hybrid vs. extension can be viewed as either same-time opposites from the perspective of the poi or same-time same direction from the perspective of the hands.

Viewed in this light, hybrids then become the "missing link" tool that beginner and intermediate spinners constantly ask for to ease their flow. This begs a few interesting questions: are there any hybrids that do not fit this paradigm, ie, cannot be viewed as at least two different timing and direction combinations? Also: is it a given that we go through a hybrid to switch between these timing and direction changes or are there other methods?

More on this to follow...

Flow practice 9-28-09

2009-10-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

A gig over the weekend afforded me the opportunity to pull out a pair of flag poi I hadn't used in forever and realized a lot of my tech worked even with the tails. The first minute and a half of this is choreo I'd developed for a different performance up in Philly this past weekend that didn't come together. After that it's all improv and a whole lot of fun :)

Video: G spins fire poi Sunday night at Burning Man 2009

2009-09-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here is G doing a ton of plane-bends and stall shifting, as well as a brief glimpse of some of the diagonal planes he and Alien Jon have been working on.

Video Tech Blog #48: split-time stall switches, plane-shifted CAPs, double staff

2009-09-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

My apologies if you read this in blog form or are subscribed through my feedburner feed--for some reason iTunes has not been posting updates to my blog for weeks and I'm finally at the end of my options, so I've deleted every post leading up to the point where iTunes stopped keeping track of my feed and I am hoping that when I reenter my old entries that they will appear once again on iTunes. This does, however, mean that you're about to get 7 entries you've seen before. Once again...I apologize :-P

After an awesome couple weeks hanging out with some of my favorite poi spinners on the east coast, I've gotten to learn a lot about split-time stall shifts in the style of Rastaxel. Insignia has been taking these and adding a plane-bent flourish in the middle. I showed this pattern to Baz and he came up with an over the arm stall. I added a Yuta stall shift to Baz's motion and though it looks sloppy I've been having a lot of fun with it. I think I may have prematurely christened the spherical CAP--I described it by the pattern it adds up to rather than its component pieces. With that in mind, here is a possible approach one could use to create spherical CAPs by isolating the poi heads when entering a Yuta stall switch. Finally, a couple fun double staff constructions based upon my own monkeying around and an interesting plane-bent idea Lucas showed me over the weekend. See you guys after Burning Man!

A double dose of tasty tech, Part 2: featuring Insignia

2009-08-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago at Boom Boat, Insignia showed off some spherical CAP ideas that really sent me back to the drawing board to see what was possible. Here are some of those ideas rendered, plus some more fun stall switching patterns and head orbit play.

A double dose of tasty tech, Part 1: featuring Baz

2009-08-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

I've been lucky enough that the past couple weeks I've gotten to catch up with some of my favorite east coast poi spinners and gotten to shoot a little bit of video of some of the cool tricks they've been working on. Here's the first of two videos: Baz Simon doing some plane-bending tech at our friend Aaron's (Fractal) wedding.

Spherical or plane-bent CAPs?

2009-08-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

The past few weeks in my video blog, I've played with the concept of taking our current understanding of elliptical CAPs and translating them into 3-D shapes. I dubbed the concept "spherical CAPs" but I'm now starting to question if it's either accurate or actually descriptive of the concept. Here's why:

I've blogged before about the mathematics of CAPs (or at the very least referenced what someone else wrote on the topic ;) and have finally come to understand that the concept is rooted not necessarily in the idea of having a repeatable "move" per-se, but in the idea of having multiple segments that incorporate different moves to form new patterns--hence "assembly patterns." This now explains to me why elliptical CAPs are referred to as such: they are collections of ellipses that are assembled into larger patterns.

So are the "spherical" patterns that have been showing up in my videos made up of spheres? Nope, they're named via the opposite approach: the fact that the path of the hands trace out the wireframe of a sphere. If, for example, one where to approach using two of the 3D CAP patterns I've played with and transition between two 3D shapes, one could then make the argument that you'd created an assembly pattern made up of multiple spherical shapes, but also by that logic, moving between repeatable patterns with unit circle hybrids would likewise qualify. Perhaps we could approach the concept of a "unit sphere" the same way--not as a basic unit of movement but as a basic element of 3D CAP patterns.

Food for thought...

Video Tech Blog #47: more CAP plane-bending and CAP transition theory

2009-08-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

At boomboat over the weekend, Christian pointed out to me that all my CAP plane-bending experiments had overlooked a very obvious possibility: performing a CAP in horizontal plane. This, it turns out, is also an awesome transition to diagonal plane CAPs. Also, A bizarre property of CAP transitions into full-arm movements. It turns out that the four basic combinations of timing and directions have three transition points with the most common CAPs, so halving a flower gives you three of the four combinations--not two. Any mathematicians can tell me why?

Vulcan Tech Blog: objects in flight

2009-08-18T11:00:00.001-07:00

Not as heavy on poi, but still hella fun to watch. Noel, Greg, and Jordan transferring balls in square patterns is probably my favorite moment of this video.

Video Tech Blog #46: Old-school tech and quarter-beat stalls

2009-08-11T19:36:00.000-07:00

Starting off with a couple tricks I'd consider to be a little bit older school style tech than I usually work with--the first is inspired by rope dart tricks that shoot the head off in the opposite direction it's been wrapped in. Next is a trick that uses releases to transition from meltdown to behind-the-back waistwraps and back. This is sketchy! Next, in order to get down the spherical CAPs I've been working on the past few weeks, I've been doing drills to get my hands used to doing quarter-beat stalls in same-time opposites. Last, a staff transition to get into opposites behind the back. I'm sure there are better ways of doing it, but this is what monkeying with it on Sunday got me to. If you know better, ways, please point me to a video!

Flow Practice 8-8-09

2009-08-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

Waiting for an oil change gave me a perfect chance to try out some flow! Not terribly dancey or big in footwork, but there are some cool experiments with pendulums, wraps, and LOTS of plane-changing here. Not all of it works terribly well, but there are some cool transitions in here. Also--some attempts at dropping the spherical CAP pattern into flow. Enjoy!

Video Tech Blog #45: airwraps and dissecting the spherical CAP

2009-08-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to think if there are two more different skills I could have spent the last week playing with. Among the gaps in my knowledge are airwraps and how to get out of hyperloops. This week I finally set down to learn how this type of motion works and by and large the practice has been paying off. Also I've spent a lot of time working on the spherical CAP pattern I theorized about last week, breaking it down to each incremental movement. I'm having some success with it, but all indications show that it's going to take a while--especially given how difficult it is proving to keep many of the movements in-plane.

The pain and joys of airwraps

2009-08-03T11:36:00.001-07:00

I have a confession to make: I never learned airwraps when I began my journey into poi. It started out as just kind of an embarrassing secret I hoped nobody would ever notice and then I started running into guys who could do things with hyperloops that made me break into a cold sweat and run and hide inside large wooden objects.

Like isolations, they just seemed kind of silly and pointless to me. This year, as part of my New Year's resolutions I opted to go back through and learn these basic skills that I'd avoided before. Needless to say, it's been a trying year so far.

While there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do airwraps, I've unfortunately never found one that explained how to avoid many of the basic issues I kept having with them. Why did half of them become Gordian knots while the other have broke through clean? Why did I keep hitting my hands in the process of doing the wraps and how could I avoid doing it in the future? Most importantly: which of these lessons transferred to hyperloops and what skills would I have to learn from scratch for those?

While I'm nowhere near proficient in them yet, here are a few things I've managed to pick up so far that aren't in any of the videos. Here's hoping some other folks dealing with the frustration of these things finds something useful here:

Essentially an airwrap is the same thing as a weave, but done with the poi crossing over each other rather than your hands. This has a lot of implications that are not immediately clear. For one, it means that the simple, "just let them wrap and they'll automatically unwrap" is not necessarily the case. To wrap and then unwrap, the poi have to cross over on one side (outside the hands), continue to cross between the hands, and then uncross on the other side of the body (once again, outside the hands). You can think of this as being something like a double-decker sandwich--the planes where the poi can wrap and unwrap are like the slices of bread and whatever you put between them becomes the placement of your hands. You can ONLY unwrap when the poi plane, like the slice of bread, is completely outside of your hands on the other side. If this doesn't happen, you wind up with an ugly, ugly knot.
Timing is everything--this may sound obvious, but to me it wasn't at all. I still frequently hit my poi heads on my hands when I attempt to unwrap due to being unused to the timing of doing airwraps. The reason for this is that they don't actually move as fast as they would if you were doing a weave in the same amount of time--they move twice as fast because as the poi wrap around the middle of their leashes, they traverse half the space in the same amount of time. This means that you either need to give it half as much or one and a half times as much time as usual to cross it over to the other side of your body. Otherwise, the poi will be coming up into your hand when you anticipate it being away from your body. To get around this, I've actually been moving my hands around to follow slightly the path of the poi and make up the difference in these two timings. Sometimes it's working and sometimes it isn't.
When it comes to hyperloops, life gets a whole lot more complicated. The timing is even trickier being as how the poi are moving even faster yet, though the sandwich metaphor is easier to achieve here. The problem is that it's also really easy to shoot past the exit plane. For example, a significant number of the hyperloops I'm attempting wind up switching planes over completely, so I wind up with the loop going inside my arms on the exit side of my body and then, yep, you guessed it, tangles. My solution to this so far has been to pull my leading arm behind the nexus of the hyperloop to force it into the proper plane, but if my timing is at all off it tends to shoot straight over to being a reverse hyperloop rather than unwrapping.
It's really helpful to be able to do airwraps in both directions. This is analogous to taking the two-beat weave and learning to turn it into the three-beat weave. It not only puts your hands in the proper plane to exit, it also opens up a very basic bit of symmetry that a body should always strive for.

I'll keep on posting as I find more of these tricks. In the meantime, are there any more experienced folks out there who can point me to some additional items I should be on the lookout for?

Video Tech Blog #44: plane-bending pendulum stalls, spherical CAP theory

2009-07-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

Based upon a pendulum stall trick Baz taught me a few months ago, here's a variant that makes use of plane-bending out of stalls. Also: I've been working a lot more with elliptical CAP patterns and have a presentable version of the split-time opposites pattern. Finally, based upon Charlie's responses to my video on CAPs and plane-bending last week, a little bit of theory and three approaches to taking elliptical CAP patterns to spherical CAP patterns. One is (very roughly) demoed. Give me another week and we'll see if I can put together the others cleanly.

Music to spin to

2009-07-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

While the vast majority of the time I'm spinning, I'm either doing so to improvised sessions by drummers or canned music that's been selected by my fire performance troupe, I frequently find that those rare opportunities when I get to put on my own music for a solo performance are some of my best. Beyond the fact that I know the peaks and valleys of the music and can pace my performance to it, frequently there are people in the crowd that know the song I'm spinning to and on some level, I think the shared experience of enjoying that piece of music does something to help them appreciate my performance.

This can also make prepping for the performance more difficult as it's always tempting to put your current favorites into the playlist and frequently these aren't appropriate for performance as they can be too obscure for an audience to latch onto or not appropriate to the mood of the event. For my first year of spinning, I frequently practiced while listening to Silversun Pickups' first album, Carnavas, which is an awful record to spin to live as it's full of bizarre tempo changes and abrasive walls of noise (all of which I love, but am frequently in the minority in loving). A good beat is always helpful, but sometimes can be overwhelming as well.

In no particular order, here are my current top 5 favorite songs to spin to:

"Feel Good, Inc" - Gorillaz
"Hands In" - Patrick Lee
"Rods and Cones" - Blue Man Group
"One Pure Thought" - Hot Chip
"Let Go" - Paul Van Dyk

I always love being turned on to new music, so if any reader have any favorites, feel free to post them.

Video: Spiral Wrap Variations

2009-07-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

I don't really know what to classify this video as I'd neither consider it a tutorial nor a tech blog, but it does contain a few interesting ideas on what you can do with spiral wraps. Enjoy!

Tech Video Blog #43: Plane-bending with CAPs

2009-07-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

So regrettably these didn't come out as clean as I'd hoped, but I think there's still enough here to give folks some ideas of what's possible when you combine CAPs and plane-bending. I know there's a lot of stuff that could have been demoed but wasn't--I'll hopefully fill in gaps as time goes on or if this gives some of you out there ideas, I'd love to see some responses.

Do you know the math of CAPs?

2009-07-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

A thread on Home of Poi asking for a definition of CAPs has turned up not just an interesting history of the concept, but the most comprehensive mathematical description I've yet seen of the move. I don't pretend to understand much (or, really most) of the mathematics in this post, but I'm considering it a moral imperative to educate myself and figure out the mathematics of poi (mainly because I suspect it has major implications for concepts like Alien Code and antispin flowers).

Here is Zaltymbunk's description:

Hi everybody !!

It have been a long time i did not take a look in HOP ... and then i have not exactly caught all the purposes of the previous posts ... so i am just gonna answer the question of the topic ... sorry by advance for the possible repetitions i could make.

So what's that i have called CAPs (Continuous Assembly Patterns) ?!?

Firstly ... let me explain my vision of what a pattern is.

To my mind a pattern is a cyclic curve that can be define in a unique way by its harmonic component (frequencies or number of tours) and by its "modulus" component (radius or lengthes).

In the field of the 2 circles compounds ... which is for instance the most commonly used (i'll explain later the general case of the 3 compounds circles) ... here are some examples according to this model :

O is the shoulder, M is the hand ("Main" in french), E is the Extremity of the object (poď, club staff) and Ebis is the other extremity in the case of the staff.

Theta1 and Theta2 (frequencies or number of turns) define the harmonic part of a pattern whereas Rho1 and Rho2 (radius or length) define the "modulus" part.

Rho=1 when the arm is stretched (when the poď is unwrapped).

The patterns will be defined in the following way : Theta1 Theta2 ; Rho1 Rho2.

And now examples :

The first example is 1 4 ; 1 1 (if E would have run the other way : -1 -4 ; 1 1)
The second example is 1 -6 ; 1 1 (if E would have run the other way : -1 6 ; 1 1)

As we can see these patterns are in a particular case of "modulus" component ... as the 2 radius or lengthes are equal (in this case ... the simplest ... the values are 1) ... and called "rosettes".

There is another particular "modulus" part mode which give curves called cycloďds.
This case happen when the speeds of M and E are equal in the earth (or audience) reference. It means in terms of maths that Rho2/Rho1=abs(Theta1/(Theta1+Theta2)) (Rho1.abs(Theta1)=Rho2.abs(Theta1+Theta2)).

With the first example (1 4 ; 1 1) above it would give us :

And it would be called 1 4 ; 1 1/5.

With the example of a 3 foils "rosette" antispin (1 -3 ; 1 1) :

It would be called 1 -3 ; 1 1/2.

All the cycloids are not feasable ... i mean if we keep the arm stretched (Rho1=1) ... because the differents cases of wraps (thumb excluded) can only take the following values :

Rho2 -> Wrap

1/5 -> 2h+1f
1/4 -> 2h
1/3 -> 1h+3f
2/5 -> 1h+2f
1/2 -> 1h+1f
3/5 -> 4f=1h
2/3 -> 3f
3/4 -> 2f
4/5 -> 1f
1 -> 0f

(h for hand and f for finger)

There is also patterns with more than one arm turn (Theta1>1) ... the most popular example of these kind of pattern would be :

AKA 2 -5 ; 1 1 and 2 -5 ; 1 2/3 (if we keep the same sense of running as the examples above)

But there is a lot of other examples like:

AKA 3 2 ; 1 1 and 3 2 ; 1 3/5 (rotated by 90° in this image)

AKA 3 4 ; 1 1 and 3 4 ; 1 3/7 (typical case of unfeasable cycloid ; rotated by 45° in this image)

In general ... with poïs ... all inspins patterns are feasable whereas antispin patterns have a rule of feasability : abs(Theta1)).

Ok we have now our elementary patterns ... defined by Theta1 Theta2 ; Rho1 Rho2. If we want to take only a part of the full cycle of these patterns ... we should add another number in the definition : d (for division). 0>d>=1 and d=1 means that we take the full cycle of the pattern. So far we have Theta1 Theta2 ; Rho1 Rho2 ; d for the definition.

As the brain have two independent hemispheres ... there 2 processes of motion creation in spinning fields.

One of these is the process of patterns superposition with the two hands/poïs ... which refers to the parallel/simultaneous information treatment of the left part of the brain. The results of this process is what is commonly call : Hybrids.

The other one is the process of elementary patterns assembly (obviously drawn with one poï) ..; which refers to the serial/sequencial information treatment of the rightpart of the brain. he results of this process is what is commonly call : CAPs.

A CAP ... or complex pattern ... must as well be cyclic ... and can be the assembly of 2 (or more) elementary patterns iterated one (or more) time.

Here are some examples of CAP of 2 elementary patterns iterated one time :

The famous 1 0 ; 1 3/4 ; 1/2 & -1 4 ; 1 3/4 ; 1/2 from the yuta move analysis post.

AKA 1 0 ; 1 3/4 ; 3/4 & -1 4 ; 1 3/4 ; 3/4 (with another starting position)

AKA 1 3 ; 1 3/4 ; 2/3 & -1 3 ; 1 3/4 ; 2/3 (with another starting position)

I let you think about CAPs with more than 2 elementary patterns and more than one iteration (i'll try to add some of these with my explanation later).

Also think that ... as these CAP are patterns ... it is also allowed to put them in the hybridisation/parallel/simultaneous process to see what happen.

As i said ... later some extra explanations ... and some complements ... about the notation and the model.

If some notions need to be clarified ... do not hesitate to reply !!

Topette ("See you" as we say in my area in France) !!

To read the original thread, click here.

Tech Video Blog #42: diagonal planes and Noel's double-staff trick

2009-07-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

A highly fortuitous meeting with Alien Jon in Barcelona led to the first trick here, combining plane-bending with a concept I was unfamiliar with called diagonal planes. Currently I can only plane bend with it or turn, but I suspect other tricks will begin to emerge using these techniques. Second, at Wildfire Noel showed me a double-staff trick wherein one alternates one hand doing antispin and the other hand sliding straight across the body along its own axis which creates an 8-step move that one can easily break out of into any number of other patterns. It was a bit of a mindfuck for me, but I taught it to a gentleman at NoWhere and it helped me finally get the motion down smoothly (or at least as smoothly as a guy who has only done double staff for a few months can get it). More to come!

Plane-bending with CAPs

2009-07-19T18:58:00.001-07:00

Partially based upon Noel's video of G and partially just random messing around, I've been trying to break CAPs out into all the different zero points along their transit. It turns out that it can be split into zero points if you're tricky enough with your motion at four different points: the top and bottom of the cycle and the middle either during the antispin motion (relatively easy) or in the extensions (a lot harder). Playing with this, I've been able to switch between the standard "opposites split-time" motion in wheel plane to the wall-plane "split-time same direction" motion I'm rocking in the photo below. The transition can be done at any of the four zero points and hopefully this week I'll be able to work up a video detailing the transitions.

Plane bending: the future is here!

2009-07-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

G is the best poi spinner you've never heard of. I'd never heard of him before heading to Firedrums back in April and seriously I was blown away by him. While most of us have dabbled in plane-bending at one point or another (beginners plane-bend unintentionally all the time), few have taken it to the jaw-dropping extremes G has. Essentially, every stall is a zero point that can be used to transition to a different plane. All of the bizarre plane-bending combos I've been working on in the past few months have been inspired by his work.

Noel managed to get video of G doing a number of his transitions in the Flowspace. Check this out for some ideas guaranteed to blow your mind!

Experiments in body mechanics

2009-07-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

I spent a good long time in my poi practice session today playing with the way my body shifts its weight as I spin. Teaching in a dance studio, I'll freely confess I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder due to the fact that poi sits so uncomfortably in the middle of dance, juggling, martial arts, and street performance that alas it seems to be none of these as well. Part of the reason for this is that the movements of poi (especially tech poi) are so incredibly focused on the upper body that it's ridiculously easy to perform an entire routine's worth of material without ever moving your feet.

Given the wonderful expressiveness of the human body, it begs the question of if poi is an instrument to frame the body's movements or the body is merely the frame around the poi's movements. While it's easy to chime in wanting to avoid easy categorization and claim the answer is both, I'd submit for the record that in my day I can count the number of poi spinners who've used their poi in the former way rather than the latter.

It's not hard to see why this route is preferred. After all, most of us who come to poi spend our countless hours dissecting antispin movements, compound circles, and the all-important cateye and zero-point stalls that will make us look like tech badasses. Few of these maneuvers require us to do much more than pivot 180 degrees to turn with a figure, however. It's the very rare poi spinner who invests much time in how to move their bodies in a similarly striking fashion and thus, those who do frequently are derided by tech spinners for relying on moves shunned as being to simple.

Lately I've been trying to do both--today's experiment was in center of gravity. I usually warm up by guiding my arms through all four combinations of poi timing and direction and then by doing a number of turns with these combinations. It's very easy to do these with weight squared to the ground, only shifting when turns are necessary. But what about if we imagined our hands guiding not just our poi, but also our body weight, such that moving our hands around in same-time, same-direction results in having our hands/poi hover over each foot and then our mid-line sequentially. The effect is actually quite striking. Similarly, we shift between feet with split-time opposites and we have an excellent opportunity to bounce our weight up and down with opposites same-time. Because split-time same direction requires a balance both vertically and horizontally at all times, it essentially anchors the body in a single position.

Even more interesting is what starts happening when you deliberately work against the center of balance. This requires a mild contortion of the body that possesses many of the asymmetrical properties I've mentioned before that theoretically performance is supposed to embrace. How do other folks out there work dance into their spinning?

Planetary

2009-07-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

No, I regret this isn't an entry on Warren Ellis's landmark sci-fi satire comic book series (I'm still figure out a way to make it apply to poi ;), the title is a great excuse to give it a plug. The planetary I'm talking about is the system by which planets rotate around a solar mass and create systems of compound elliptical orbits.

I've been trying to come up with natural phenomenon that match the properties of poi and other object manipulation spinning both as a way to double-check our ideas of poi motion and to see what applications there are for thinking of poi as a mathematical model for other types of motion.

The two models I've found that best fit are the orbits of planets and moons in a solar system and the orbits of electrons in atoms and simple molecules and compounds, though fascinatingly enough they yield very different systems of motion. Atoms yield very chaotic globes in which orbits may freely swing this way and that while planetary motion seems to stabilize more or less along a single axis. Given that the majority of poi spinning occurs with both poi spinning along the same plane (and that the extensions of this, flowers, also occur in the same plane), I think it's worth asking why it is that planetary motion seems to collapse to a single plane like this and the most simple poi movements to learn also seem to possess this property.

The best answer I've been able to come up with after some helpful suggestions from friends on Facebook is mutual attraction--that is planets are attracted to each other as well as to the sun. Likewise, poi heads are attracted both to the hand and the shoulder in the course of poi motion and both are attracted to the center of the Earth. Given the pull they all have on each other, it's little wonder that the most stable plane orientation for them all seems to be all along the same one, rather than the multiple planes one finds in subatomic interactions.

Here, the reason for the multiplicity of planes is that instead of being attracted to each other, electrons are repulsed by each other, making it so their planes are constantly being reformed and shifted over and over again. One could probably approximate this effect by putting magnets in the heads of one's poi that were powerful enough to push away from each other from a few inches in distance or by making it a rule in spinning that plane-bending should always occur when poi are within a few inches of each other. In fact, such a style might really be fascinating to watch.

Neither system is a perfect model for poi, but they both lend themselves to some fascinating spinning thought experiments. In fact, I'm willing to bet that going through planetary rotation models will yield some shapes both familiar and mindblowing to us.

Tech Video Blog #41: Plane-bending exercises, CAP-ellipse transitions, atomic flow

2009-07-07T05:55:00.000-07:00

After an exhausting but wonderfully fun and educational weekend at the PEX Summer Festival, I've got a whole bunch of new tech courtesy the patient guidance of Richmond's Lucas Boyd. First up is a plane-bending exercise I've started playing with to explore all three planes by transitioning between them with floats. I've got same-time same direction and same-time opposites so far. After that, some cool CAP effects including a way to transition between CAPS using linear extensions, which also adds one more type of CAP turn to those I demoed in my tutorial a few weeks ago. After a sloppy attempt at an atomic fountain, there's a demo here on how you can use those Yuta-style plane-shifting stalls to introduce atomics into flow.

Off to Spain for a week for NoWhere--peace, kids!

Tech Video Blog #40: Charlie's cube, lots of plane changing

2009-07-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

A demo of the cube Charlie demonstrated for me at Wildfire--this takes seven plane shifts to accomplish and works through crossed arms, wall plane, and buzzsaw positions. A real challenge, but a fun one! Next up is a plane-changing pattern that works between opposites same-time and corkscrew into a kind of pendulum stall before reversing itself into the exact same pattern it started as. I really like how the reverse of this pattern is itself, whereas reversing most poi sequences require you to reverse the directions of all your movements. Finally, a plane-changing throw that has a lot in common with the Yuta stalls I've been playing with.

Adventures in body mechanics

2009-06-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

Now here's a bizarre problem for you: how do you correct the way your body is built and moves?

At about the age of 12, I lost the arches in my feet and spent 15 years with orthodic insoles in my shoes, avoiding running long distances because they would cause my knees to swell and lock up for days. Needless to say, it kind of sucked.

Then, about two years ago I started visiting a chiropractor who over the course of several months made adjustments to me that repaired the arches in both feet, albeit temporarily. Since then it's been an ongoing battle to continue to maintain a corrected foot articulation as more than ten years of displacement mean that my bones now naturally align in the wrong spot.

Recently, I've been finding that this has had a huge effect on my poi spinning--especially with regards to foot and body work. A video my girlfriend recorded several months ago of me practicing on top of a wall in Ocean City, MD showed that my gait was a rather underwhelming knock-kneed posture. While the vast majority of techies I know are focused on what the hands are doing, I'm also aware that every other human being the world has been watching me performing and wondering if I have to pee.

To try and get myself in a more performance-worthy posture, I've been attacking my habit of sitting cross-legged when sitting for long periods of time, reasoning that if my inner leg muscles are tightening involuntarily a big part of the reason why could be that that's the posture they remain in for most of the day. Truth be told, the last time my body had this kind of annoyance with me was when I quit caffeine and went through withdrawl. It's definitely made me more irritable, and ironically enough reminds me a lot of a passage from a Michael Crichton book I once read called Travels.

In it, Crichton goes through an entity removal with some New Age-y friends and finds afterwards that after arguments he felt as though a mental place he could retreat and sulk had disappeared and that he was now forced to more directly confront issues that arose around him. Similarly, I feel as though a place I used to go hide in my head has now disappeared and part of my irritability seems to stem from not being able to access a "safe" place inside my head.

Whether its psychosomatic or not, it does make me wonder about the link between body and mind and how embracing physical activities reshapes us both physically and psychologically. In the meantime, my legs are much more easily accepting a normal gait and videos are certainly showing my legwork to be improving as a result. We'll see what happens as the experiment continues.

More footwork vids!

2009-06-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

So apparently a trend has begun of doing videos for poi footwork and now the godfather of poi, Nick Woolsey has posted one describing how he does his whirling dervish-style footwork. Special guest-stars include Burning Dan and Alien Jon!

What's up with the weird visuals at the end? I have no idea...apparently iTunes' visualization engine is taking over the world :-P

Wildfire roundup

2009-06-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Back from Wildfire and lots of videos are popping up...mostly from Christian and myself. Helpfully, both of us recorded a couple lesson sessions and noodling. Here are some of my favorites from the weekend:

For more of Insignia's videos, hit up his video stream on YouTube here.

To see all my videos from Wildfire, click here.

Tech Video Blog #39: more cateye stalls, elliptical CAPs

2009-06-25T06:47:00.000-07:00

At Wildfire, Charlie and I worked through all the four compass points of a cateye and worked out the stalls that transitioned out of each point--there is some crossover here with the Yuta stalls I was playing with two weeks ago. The thing that's got my brain burning (and unfortunately I haven't had shit for time to play with them) is elliptical CAP patterns of the type Zan is showing off in the Encyclo-Poi-Dia 2. My initial breakdown of this move turned out to be incorrect, so I'll be working out the proper iterations of it in the coming week.

Also: Christian requested a link to a chart I've been working up of poi moves in different path widths. A jpg of it can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/n2b32t and here: http://tinyurl.com/l85gc8

Today Wildfire...tomorrow the world!

2009-06-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Wildfire today for what looks like a full docket of awesome classes. I'll have my camera with me, so expect lots of footage of the East Coast's answer to Firedrums. If you're there, I'm teaching weaves at 9:30 tomorrow morning, pendulums at 4, and flowers bring and early tomorrow morning again at 9:30.

Hopefully the forecasts of buckets of rain for this part of Connecticut are exaggerated :-P

Polyhedron Flowers

2009-06-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

A combination of stuff inspired this--first, in pursuit of a unit sphere, I've failed miserably to find a construct that would fit the requirements of it, but many of the experiments I've worked through in the process have proven interesting in their own right. One such example is the 3D pyramid pattern from my last video post, which I suppose is technically a triangular tetrahedron. Taking Cyrille's law that all poi polygons should be symmetrical with two poi, I've been working out ways of using plane-bending and stalls to achieve this end. Here are a couple results:

First, the triangular tetrahedron from my original video, but rendered now with two hands spinning opposite directions same-time. By having them switch planes by 60 degrees at each vertice from the previous two angles they've moved through, resulting in the tetrahedron having two sides each defined by the movement of each hand. The way one draws out this shape is to the left with each hand's path sketched out in a different color. The biggest issue with this pattern is that you don't end at the same point you started with, so you have to draw the pattern multiple times to get back to your start point.

Next is a cube, or I guess square hexahedron. This one I admit cheats a bit and defines two of its planes only by implication, but it does retain a split-time same direction symmetry and can theoretically can be performed by turning the entire body in 90 degree increments at every other vertex. Unlike the tetrahedron, this does return you to your original position.

So, there you go...I can get each shape with one hand at a time currently, but not with both hands together. Give me time, though ;)

Tech Video Blog #38: Atomic CAP (I kid you not), unit sphere theory, stall intensive continues

2009-06-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

Starting off with an utterly bizarre pattern--the same-time opposites CAP performed with the extension in wall plane and the antispin petal in corkscrew plane. The idea for this came from a post Dyami made about the idea of a unit sphere on the Tech Poi forum of Tribe.net. I think the concept is a dead-end, but trying to prove it has led to some really interesting patterns, including a 3D triquetra I play with in here. Also, the transition from butterfly top-stall to hybrid that I couldn't include last week is in here and finally I'm working turns into my stall intensive.

MCP on 3D spinning

2009-06-16T09:17:00.001-07:00

I posted my blog entry on a 3D unit sphere on my facebook profile and got a really interesting and insightful response from MCP. Check it out:

You're talking about projection. You could look into projecting a sphere onto a flat plane, strangely, there's a lot of information already related to that... ;) Except your sphere is invisible and your stating that there are basically no '3d' patterns that when projected onto a flat plane can't be replicated by 2d ones?

Well for poi, that might be the case, projection has some interesting issues, I'm not sure how it works with a moving point over a sphere, but it might be the case that thou you can replicate the pattern, you might not be able to replicate the exact timing.

Further, yes, a 2d trick can replicate a 3d trick, but only in one plane, so, er, for one plane of viewing. the real 3d trick will also have it's pattern visible for other planes of viewing. ... Read More

Further again, since poi has only one end, hahahahahahahaahaaaaaa, yeah it can't be in two planes at once, like a staff can. So it probably doesn't apply to staffs like you think it will.

And er, also fans, hoops, crosses, s staffs, are 2D props, unlike poi or staff which are 1D so obviously won't work that way.

But even thou they are 1D, if you imagine the line of the poi as a line on the plane. You can still move the plane, rather than spinning the poi in the plane.

Imagine doing a wheel plane horizontal float up at say your ... Read Moreleft side with you left hand. If you imagine the plane as a wall on the side of you, then if you're very skilled and perhaps have stiffish poi, while the poi is still horizontal you manage to pull it to the right side of your body, then you've managed to translate the plane from wheel plane on your left to your right, the plane passing through your body.

Interesting--thinking of 3 dimensional spinning as being the point of start and 2D slices as being projections of it is a fascinating idea. One outcome of this already discussed on the Tech Poi tribe on Tribe.net is flattening the standard figure-8 pattern into a wall-plane infinity loop. I need to work through the concept further, but from what I've played with so far, poi still has a limiting factor that no other tool save rope dart does: it is flexible and therefore must enter follow gravity beneath the hand or the hand must keep the poi in motion. Any attempt to have the hand and poi trace different planes is unstable because of how the hand redirects poi inertia. Granted, people probably once said the same thing about cateyes, but I'm really truly not seeing any possibilities for spinning with one hand in multiple planes simultaneously, in which case the conclusion that 3D spinning ultimately is only either a projection of 3D shapes as MCP here suggests or a 2D slice of such shapes is still the correct one.

Slo-mo Poi

2009-06-14T19:29:00.001-07:00

Wow...just, wow. There's nothing terribly complex or tech-y in this video, yet I can't remember the last time I saw a poi video that more reminded me of the beauty our art is capable of than this one.

Seriously, I want to see more slo-mo poi videos come from this--I dig this trend :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-aEt9TltEw

Exhausted but proud

2009-06-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

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. Between 9 and about 12:30 last night, we fought back the impending rain storms and everybody's nerves at being recorded to do about three takes of the full choreography with a kick-ass building in the background that had a gigantic neon sign that said "ART" on it--needless to say, I'm a big fan of our setting :)

Big thanks to everybody who threw down last night, from Ludent who drove hours to drum for us to Kip and the camera crew, Mer, Sandy, and all the other photographers who I'm sure will be sending us fabulous photo documentation of the process and performances.

Finally, big thanks to Eileen for running practices and composing most of the choreo--I know her nerves were worn down bare by the end, but I really think you created something that we're all going to watch and adore and god only knows you had more patience for peoples' crap (including my own) than I would have.

I'll post a vid when I have it :)

A 3D Unit Sphere?

2009-06-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

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.

I've been back and forth on this now for the past couple weeks because I can't for the life of me think of any new concepts this would add to the vocabulary of poi, but also not wanting to dismiss the concept completely because there is always the possibility I've become so focused on a given paradigm I can't see my way out of it. The issue with this concept I keep stopping at is that by definition I think poi spinning is two-dimensional.

What do I mean by this? Well, the head of a poi can only be in one direction from the hand anchoring it at any given time and the influence of gravity will always make it settle in one direction. The same issue exists with all spinning tools I'm aware of, from staff to meteor. The movement of a hand guiding a poi always represents a single two-dimensional slice of a three dimensional shape since it can only explore one extension of the shape at any given time. To describe this another way, imagine if your hand could support spinning three poi at once--one in each of the three planes. In this case, you could move your hand in three dimensions in ways that would drastically change the behavior of all three poi.

Put another way, think of poi spinning as being like watching a movie. While what we see on screen is a two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional scene, it doesn't seem in the least bit odd to us. The reason for this is that we really see in only two dimensions, but sort out a third by overlapping two two-dimensional images on top of each other and working out the differences between the two. Likewise, when viewing a poi spinner, no viewer can sort more than two dimensions of poi movement at a given time. Poi being spun parallel to the angle of the viewer is seen for all intents and purposes as a straight line. By the same token, any trick done in three dimensions that I can conceptualize will wind up resembling a two dimensional trick that has likely already been named when seen by an audience.

Thus any three-dimensional family of figures one can map out in a "unit sphere" actually wind up just being two-dimensional figures rendered differently for the audience. Or at least that's the conclusion I keep coming to. Anybody else have any success finding 3D moves that don't have 2D corollaries?

Tech Video Blog #37: Yuta stalls with floats, hybrids, cateyes, and more footwork

2009-06-09T19:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Footwork in poi

2009-06-08T20:27:00.000-07:00

Nightanddaydance posted a great response to my last vid, specifically outlining some more foot and body work for use with poi dancing. Some of the asymmetrical options remind me of a performance class I took in college wherein they emphasized very heavily to us the use of asymmetrical movement and poses to add interest to a performance.

Some examples: in Japanese Noh theater the actors move in a fashion where there appears to be something dragging on their waists, making their movements deliberately slow yet fascinating to watch. Balinese dance is another great example, alternating asymmetric combinations of hand and foot raised. Even the martial art capoeira is centered around essentially being in control of being off balance.

This has given me a lot of ideas I can't wait to play with--check out the video for some cool explorations of how the body can be used for poi performance. We always focus so much on the tricks that it's cool to see some emphasis like this on the rest of the body :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQc3Tn6sJto

Fun with Yuta stalls

2009-06-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

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.

I doubt that makes much sense written out--when I video it, that should help clarify. In the meantime this leads to another cool place: if one approaches the zero points in between the plane shifts from the perspective of being the apex of a pendulum stall/float, some fun possibilities start to emerge, such as using Yuta-style stalls to switch between hybrids--no bullshit!

If one is doing the standard extension vs. isolation hybrid poi in same direction/same time motion, you can use the point where the poi are coming up from the bottom of the circle as the point of stall/float and go straight into a Yuta stall around to the other side of your body. Once there, you just have to let your hands drop to go into another hybrid or you can switch spinning same time/same direction static spin or isolations just like you would with a normal Yuta stall. I haven't practiced a lot in front of mirrors, but so far it looks like switching from hybrid to hybrid is slightly problematic because the poi don't have enough momentum behind them to stay horizontal at the end like they would in a standard Yuta stall, so switching between the standard Yuta stalls and hybrids looks to be the more efficient way of doing this.

Needless to say, this also opens up the possibilities of doing the same thing with floats! :)

Tech Video Blog #36: Carolingian Cross, stall intensive, footwork

2009-06-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Based upon my earlier entry on the Carolingian Cross, here are a couple variants demonstrated. Given the massive amount of stall play I saw at Firedrums this year, I've undertaken to get my stalls better under control, so I've been working on doing every combination of complimentary stalls I can think of to get better at these. Finally, some advice from Baz and Nightanddaydance have led me to invest a lot more time and thought into my footwork and how that governs my performances.

Enjoy!

Abject shots from Sean and Tash's roof

2009-06-02T15:30:00.001-07:00

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

http://public.fotki.com/abjectphoto/sean-and-tash-rooft/

Fun with stalls and hybrids

2009-06-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Playing with this reminds me of a combo Baz demoed at Firedrums: split-time opposites flower spun in antispin stalls out to a top and bottom stall to one side with the hands separated by a poi length. One continues it's original direction all the other reverses, thus leading to the "same-time" hybrid where the hands move split-time. I try it now without the antispin flower. The hand on bottom does a vertical float and comes back down the same direction as the other hand, thus leading to the same hybrid--cool! :)

While I'm playing with these another 3D pattern starts to form in my head. for this I do a top and bottom stall from split-time opposites, Yuta-style and stall it in corkscrew plane around me to emerge on the other side and rather than going straight back into split-time opposites, I reverse my stalls to make the top hand top stall and bottom hand bottom stall, then horizontal stall back to the other side and allow the poi to complete their paths up and down on the opposite side, thus switching into same-time opposites.

That makes absolutely no sense written out :-P

It's beginning to dawn on me that I should warm up with horizontal as well as vertical plane-bending globes at the beginnings of my practice sessions if I continue to play this much in corkscrew plane.

A fond farewell

2009-06-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Sean is one of my favorite poi artists to spin with--he can do all the crazy stalls that drive me crazy and somehow manages to come up with 1.5 combos I can barely wrap my head around. Now the two of them are moving off to Japan for a year while Tash teaches English and Sean stalks Yuta :)

I'll miss all the crazy times I've had with them in Brooklyn and spinning in the city, from the party a Grandspace where Tash tried to teach me how to do a three-beat weave with hoops (I was a very poor study) to New Year's Eve when I briefly became an honorary Gyronaut and the following day when we went to go spin in a nearby park in single-digit degree weather.

Japan is richer for you guys, so here's to you--and get back in one piece, dammit!

In the meantime, here is a vid of the two of them spinning on New Year's Day this year. Godspeed, my friends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxrDp1lEX3U

In search of the Carolingian Cross

2009-05-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

In my last blog posting, I noted an interesting shape based upon the triquetra I'd found in a wikipedia article and was pretty sure could be accomplished with poi--I've spent most of the past evening and day thinking through how and coming up with different approaches to it.

About mid-day today, I thought I'd had it: imagine a square, bisected through both corners. You start at the middle and do a single triquetra, but when you reach the point of origin, you perform another triquetra 90 degrees off of the first one and so on and so forth all the way around the square. I discovered I could do the pattern in under 3 seconds which, according to Abject, is what I should be shooting for to create a recognizable pattern. Below is a diagram I did in Illustrator to visualize the concept.

There's just one problem: this doesn't actually come out looking like the Carolingian Cross in the wikipedia entry. Conceptually they bear similarities, but there is no distinction between the triquetra nodes at each corner. Back to the drawing board.

Using the same method, I tried separating out the center nodes till it began to have the same appearance as the wikipedia figure:

As you can see, the hand path is no longer a simple square--in fact, it appears to be an antispin flower in its own right. Months ago I'd toyed with the idea of compound flowers in this way and this appears to be an excellent test of the idea. Back to practice--let's see if this one is doable.

Further adventures with Triquetras

2009-05-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

For most of the past year, I've called this trick a trifoil or antispin flower hybrid, yet somehow overnight the terminology switched to triquetra and I didn't know why until Nick Woolsey posted his latest online tutorial.

The source of the name is interesting to me--especially given that I grew up in a Lutheran church (well, not literally) and triquetra patterns could be found all around. Catholics tend to like their iconography, such as the crucifix and many pictures/paintings of saints and holy people while Protestants tend to wind up with more abstract patterns in their churches. After viewing Nick's vid, I went and checked up on what wikipedia had to say about triquetras and found this helpful article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triquetra

Among the interesting tidbits in it is a fascinating figure that's got my creative juices flowing that includes a triquetra knot in four corners of what looks to me like a four-petal antispin flower. If indeed I'm right in this assessment, I reckon it should be possible to do this figure with poi. As each corner looks like it represents 3/4 of a full circle, my theory is that by stopping at each corner and waiting till the poi is in that 3/4 position before moving on to the next corner, a body can render this knot. Essentially this means that you'd be stopping your hand to let the poi catch up at each corner and then moving it swiftly past the nearest compass point. I'll do a vid if this approach works.

A blast from my past

2009-05-28T15:43:00.001-07:00

Last weekend at PDF, Ian (Imperial) and myself collaborated on some poi shots for Abject when he was set up near PEX the final night of the event. He'd mentioned that the shots would be up in a few days and I just went to check. While our shots are not up yet, I did stumble into something that hit me with a major flash of nostalgia:

Abject was apparently set up and taking pictures the second night of the burn at Burning Man 2006. This is exciting to me because this was the first Burning Man I ever went to and in fact this very night at Hookah Dome was my introduction to both poi and firespinning--I'd never seen either one before.

http://public.fotki.com/abjectphoto/bm-2006-hookahdome/

There were two fire dancers in particular who caught my eye that night (ironically enough, neither spun poi--one was a hooper and the other a rope dart artist) and when I get the time I'd love to see if Abject caught any shots of either one in here.

Wild :)

Noel-ski's timing and direction vids

2009-05-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Noel just finished his series on the different combinations of timing and direction for tools that can be used by each hand independently. I've played with all the poi stuff already, but seeing it render against double-staves was really helpful in terms of translating movement between the two tools and seeing how differently similar ideas come out between them. Doubles give me a lot of trouble because movement on both sides counts as a beat, rather than thinking of them is a poi that continues through the other side of your hand.

The breakdown in isolation hoops is fantastic, too. I am not nearly grokking this tool at all...would have been nice to seen these combos done in fans, too, but I think the tech on fans is still enough in its infancy people haven't played with them in this way just yet.

It'll be fun to take all these movements and work through them in both wheel and wallplane in the same fashion as Insignia and I have spent the past few months breaking apart the components of triquetras and building compound figures out of them, not to mention direction shifts.

One of the things I love about flowers (and that I played with in my first couple poi tutorials) is the fact that each flower pattern has what I'd consider to be transit points between different flower shapes. For example: same time, same direction breaks out into same time, opposites at the apex and bottom of the circle and split-time, opposites at either side--all you have to do is switch the direction of one of your hands. This is partially the idea behind the first trick I showed off in my tech poi vid yesterday, but the examples here are definitely more detailed.

Two thumbs up--keep the vids coming, Noel :)

And so it begins

2009-05-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

So it's finally happened...I bit the bullet and started up a new blog. My old one was a relic of post high-school days and I've written from time to time on subjects that interest me from the business plan of the Kindle to my ongoing and deep-seated hatred of the major record label companies (when they finally collapse, big party at my house--serious), but up until now I haven't had anything to write about that I deemed a regular blog to be worthwhile to keep up.

But now I'm finding with poi I'm having a lot of thoughts that take shape in a written form before I'm able to do them. Whether its the need to visualize a move or compile a theory or even just wanting to do a move that is beyond my current technical ability, writing it out is happening more and more often for me and thus it makes sense to post those thoughts somewhere.

In keeping with the spirit of my video blog, this one is guaranteed to include embarrassing mistakes, dead-ends, and silly explorations that I'm sure other poi spinners will delight in jumping on me for. So be it. I'm coming to this in the hopes that I can reach out to the wider community of poi spinners and be able to have the conversations with them I currently only get to every few months when I travel for this spinning event or that spinning event. While many of you have tons of people in your area who are chomping at the bit to discuss theory, I rarely get to have that experience here in DC, so here's hoping you'll help me have a bit of that experience vicariously.

While I had hoped I'd be able to include my tech blog videos in a fashion that would make this work as a video podcast, I'm afraid that will have to wait for further upgrades. In the meantime, expect lots of rambling thoughts, videos, images, and the like as I work my way through the art and science of poi. Hopefully you read something that strikes your fancy and if you don't please ensure the caps-lock key is off when typing your response.

Now sit back and enjoy the show.

Peace,
Drex