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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Weave Death

Well, this was inevitable. And now I progress to the greater evolution of this precious flow art.

My weave dance is about over. This, because I shot a video of it. And I looked at it without seeing the poi. And all I could see was a hunched over person focusing all energy internally, hands tied together and staying close to body core.

I didn't want my dance to look like that. I want it to be free and expressive and OPEN. I began to really move my arms and hands OUT from my body, stretching to maximum extension and re-discovering those BASIC poi moves. It felt good. For the first time in a while, I got the good ole spine tingle... for me, that means I'm opening up new energy channels. Yay!

The FINAL nail in the coffin was when I realised that my "tight weave" manuever could be best explained by saying "pretend like you have handcuffs on"... I did subsequently confirm that I can do forward / backward / spinning weave while handcuffed, but was that really the dance I wanted to be putting out into the universe?

So, farewell continuous weave, hello OPEN SPINNING.

With Open Heart Forward,
+h30ry

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Weave Revelations

Well, I've been both meditating, and just started to begin feeling, what, a little "stuck" in the weave coccoon. So I thought I would expand the repetroire a bit and watch some Pele instructional video.

The first four lessons were all stuff I already knew, but it was still nice to see it executed with perfect form, and I learned a few things about planes. I also found a "hole" in my practice which I didn't know about. Strangely, I could with ease do the backwards left over right crossover, the forwards right over left crossover, the fowards left over right crossover. But when it came to the backwards right over left crossover, I hit myself in the face, every time. Wow! So, I practiced that until I "healed" the hole. I'm sure it will open up new areas in my freestyle play, since now we are back to "balance" with that move.

Now, the next thing was something that C had taught me, the corkscrew. But Pele gave me an entiirely new revelation with a single comment:

The Corkscrew is simply the Weave on a Horizontal Plane

BAM!

First, I could now do one weave at least, the split time counterclock, with ease. I practiced that a bit. It felt good. I practiced spinning my body in circles while corkscrewing. It felt good. I really tried to keep my spine completely upright, because one of the things that bothered me about Pele's corkscrew was that she was constantly bent forward over it, hunched. I wanted to do it standing erect. This meant that the poi came *really* close to my chest, almost buzz-saw style, but as long as I could deal with that and remain calm, it worked.

OK, now heres the second part of the revelation:

Like I said, I have a pretty decent feeling freestyle weave dance, where I can spin, change directions, and reverse directions at will anywhere in the beat. I've also been doing a lot of experimenting with moving the center of the weave up and down in space (high over head, low near groin). Finally, I've been experimenting with both "loose" and "tight" weave, which I define as how much the wrists move through space, and relative to eachother, as the weave moves. You can basically do a "tight" weave with handcuffs on. Seriously. You just psychicly "glue" your wrists together and movve those poi.

Sudenly, in a fairly tight weave while spinning my body, I realised that the poi had shifted to horizontal planes, and that I was doing an erect spinning corkscrew! Sweet! Then what Pele said about the corkscrew being a horizontal weave made total sense, and I also had an ultrasmooth transition between the two moves.

But best of all, its just more life into my freestyle flow improv, which is the only way I really like to dance :)