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

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

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

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

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

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?

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

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!