Performance

Last month, London Fire Spinners performed for the #TheMovement global launch party at ZSL London Zoo. It was a lot of fun for all concerned and we had a great time. I took some photos, so here they are!

I returned from a trip to Canada not too long ago. Now, in the past, every time I’ve hung out with Katelyn, I’ve had a hundred and one poi ideas to share with her. And, invariably, both of us would forget what I did. So this time, when I started showing her things, she stopped me and made me get my phone out so she could video what I did. ...

A while ago, I joined this awesome collaborative production company called HitRecord. It’s a little bit different. It’s a collaborative production company. Think open source, Creative Commons and a whole bunch of delightful humans rolled into one package. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. As long as it’s your own work. It leads to some incredible collaborations like this: …that arise from someone writing a short story, then someone else drawing a couple of character illustrations, then someone else recording a reading of the story, then someone else recording a live green-screened rendition ...

Cyrille Humen and Kyle…er… something posted this video a while back and I remember being incredibly impressed with it and amused at its completely light-hearted approach to performance. Whereas many other videos that people post are serious and polished and a real “performance”, this has more of a “hey we got to playing around – check out what we did!” feel! All in all, a lovely piece of contact juggling! ...

Last year, I went to Burning Man, a festival quite unlike anything else on earth. To call it an ‘Arts Festival’ would be doing it a disservice. I won’t go into the ins and outs of it because it’ll take me several hours to write something satisfactory. Instead, check this out. It’s done the rounds on the Internet and has gone spectacularly viral since its release and is still one of the best Burning Man videos I’ve seen. ...

Unintentional alliteration aside, I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but didn’t quite know what to say. Before we go on, I invite you to watch this video. No, really, watch it. Read more about positive psychology here Breaking up the learning process One of the things that so appeals to me about object manipulation disciplines in general is the progressive nature of the learning process. ...

The D&B/dubstep/glitch wizard, Pretty Lights’ latest batch of tasty remixes are singularly awesome and none more so than this gem. It’s a montage of his Red Rocks gig in Colorado and the way the tune flows and how he mixes in classic rock songs into the glitchy backdrop is sublime!

This is mostly for Katelyn, who has been itching to get more things out of my head and into hers. It’s a bit tricky to do this, however, when we’re separated by an inconvenient ocean. So I got Skins to shoot some rough & ready clips of me flailing wildly with my poi in the hope that someone somewhere finds some new ideas!

My friend Mark Steyn, an awesome contact juggler just posted this quick short of him doing a routine in London. Well worth a look!

It’s been an age since I got a clip of myself just jamming with my poi, but we managed to get one when I went north to Arbroath to visit a friend. It was an amazing day and there was nobody around for miles so we had ourselves a play session! While it’s not hugely varied, it serves as a nice reminder for me to mix things up some and to remember long-forgotten or little-used moves and patterns as at the moment, I need reminding that variety is the spice of life! ...

 Nom nom nomWay back – well, it’s been about 2 weeks – Karsten came over to the UK to hang out with us. We went to an epic free beach party and spent the wee hours of the morning wandering the banks of the Thames. We watched the sun rise over Tower Bridge and generally had a great time. That was Saturday night. Sunday morning, we crashed out, woke up in the late afternoon and then spent the day playing with poi. ...

Flow arts – poi, staff, clubs, juggling, contact, etc – are all arts for the body. Yet, this amazing, flexible, beautiful and vital piece of the puzzles goes ignored for the longest time! This is a recurring trait that I see over and over among new budding flow artists. It most often manifests in the tendency to plant your feet close together and pretend to be a tree while playing. ...

Nick finally OK’d Karen’s video that’s been floating around the Facebooks in secret (shh) for the last month or so and I can now officially share it with the world. Honestly, don’t go to Bali. It’s a horrible place and there is no fun to be had there whatsoever. It’s really cold, wet, boring and there are no fun people there at all. Oh wait.

So, the latest DiRT rally game, DiRT3 is coming out in a month or so and one of the trailers I saw had an absolutely stunning soundtrack. So I looked it up on YouTube and it turns out it was used in some rather spectacular videos – like this one!

My friend Max edited together his videos from Bali and posted them. Contains humour and hilarity and scenes of a fun nature!

Came across this lovely gem in a poi video and it’s a beauty to flow to! https://youtu.be/oc-ZQftx1Jg

As promised in my earlier post, I’ve thrown together a quick video on the subject of ground-state moves. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful!

I want to introduce folks to a concept I’ve been thrashing out in my head while teaching. I call it ‘ground-state’ moves. The Lead-up While playing around with a bunch of new stuff that I had seen in various videos on YouTube – Rastaxel, PoiBoy, Drex, Alien Jon, G, etc – I came across countless moves that looked awesome and appeared to flow very well and were actually very simple at the core. ...