Drex here from DrexFactor.com, sharing with
you the love of poi spinning and flow arts to benefit your body and brain and today I have a
long awaited beginner combo tutorial for you all. Before we dive in though I just want to give a
quick shout out to the friends of the channel. Big thanks to Dark Monk, Fire Mecca, Flow Fests,
Flowtoys, Juggling Calling, Pyroterra Lighttoys, Spinballs, and Ultrapoi for helping to
make the videos on this channel possible. You can learn more about all of these amazing
businesses and what they’re doing to support flow artists like yourself by checking out the links
that I have down in the description of this video.
And special thanks to non-business friends of
the channel, Johnny Howard, Lain Mochinsky, and Pekka Pehkonen! Thank you all so very much
for your support for my work and my mission! So, many of us poi spinners learn our tricks in
isolation and have no idea how to switch back and forth between them, so every once in a while
I try and come up with a cool way that you can combine what you've got and also give yourself
some additional learning that'll help you with your poi dance in the future.
That's the purpose
of these combo tutorials and this particular one is a beginner combo that centers around
both level changes as well as plane changes. If you're new here, please make sure to hit
that subscribe button! I post lots of videos on learning poi tricks and technique and combos
such as this as well as flow arts culture. To get down this combo, you're gonna need
the following poi tricks: number one: the forwards three-beat weave, number two: the windmill and specifically the
variation of it sometimes called "Poitruvian Man", horizontal flowers, and, of course, stalls. I will go ahead and leave links to tutorials
for all of these different tricks down in the description as well as up in the cards
if you are watching this video on YouTube. I'll show you the combo first at full speed, take you through it piece by piece, and
then show it to you again in slow motion. Alright, so basically there's two primary
reasons that I'm putting together this combo: the first is that as you may have noticed it
involves a lot of level changes–that is going high with the poi and going low with the poi, as
well as getting comfortable with stalling out of split time same direction.
A lot of beginners
really wrestle with this, so I wanted to create a combo that was specifically geared towards
this. Now, this starts out by taking…really, like, this moves back and forth. So if you want
to you can start a little off to stage left here. What you're going to be doing throughout
most of this combo is doing steps out to one side and then steps out to the other
side, so it kind of moves back and forth. The basic step that you're going to be playing
with is: whichever direction you're moving, you're going to cross the opposite foot over.
So
if I'm moving to the right, I'm crossing my left in front of my right and then I'm opening up.
As I go back to the left, I'm going to cross my right over my left and open back up. There is
one exception to this and it's when we're doing these horizontal flowers, in which case we're
doing a chaines step, so what that involves is basically I swing my left foot around in
front of me and my right foot around behind me. We do the chaines step back to the left side as
well by swinging the right foot in front of us and swinging the left foot behind us.
That
is…should be all the footwork you need for this. Alright, so let's talk about what the poi is
doing here. I very deliberately did this in such a way that there would never be a time
when the poi felt like it was going reverse split time same direction, only forwards. So
we go ahead and we start off by turning to our right and doing a forwards three beat weave in
that direction. Now you're only going to get in one rep of this–what that means is that you're
going to go left over right, right over left, and then you're going to stall out of it.
You're going to kind of open up in front of you and then you're going to switch into doing
a forwards weave off to your left side with the right going over the left, the left going
over the right and stalling out of it like so. This combines with the footwork as such
as my left hand goes over my right hand, my left foot crosses in front and we open up so
there's actually a reflection in what the feet are doing with what the poi are doing again.
Left over right and then back open right over left and then back open.
It kind of…it kind of
rhymes with itself, George Lucas style, you see? [George Lucas] Again, it's like
poetry, so if they rhyme…every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one. Alright so after we do our step
off to the right, open left open, we switch things up and out of our three
beat weaves and instead go into our windmills. Now, it's going to be interesting because it's
going to involve a level change instead of keeping the poi at about shoulder or maybe hip height,
we're now taking it up above our shoulders. I also want to add a new element to this in that when we
do the thing where we go over to the side here, we stall our poi down and we kind of drop down in
our levels with it, yeah? So the windmill is going to start from this place where I believe I have
my right poi up, my left poi down, because I just came from stalling this weave here.
Boom! And as
that happens, my first move is to pull that left hand poi up around behind my left shoulder like
so. As that happens, my left foot steps in front and I step back out in order to stall. Now my left
hand poi is up, my right hand poi is down and as I go back to the other side. I'm going to go right
behind and out, but remember we want to do this from a place where we go down so it turns into:
go around and down, go around and down. You're trying to get down in your levels on each side,
there. Around and down, around and down like so. So the final little section of
this is going to involve doing horizontal flowers back and forth across the stage and there's going to be kind of a trick to
this–because the first time around we're going to do those horizontal flowers under our arms and the
second time around we're going to do them over our arms. Just to get used to each of these, right? So
for this case, we're going to bring our poi around as we step out with our left foot and then our
right foot.
So you're going to do, like, basically one petal, here. Boom! When you take the step
and then open back out and you're going to take one petal as you step out and come around.
Really, you can more or less pull this off just by like letting the poi hang out to the side
and pausing for a second when you take that step. This almost happens just naturally by itself if
you just leave your arms out and let the poi do what they're gonna do. It does get a little bit
more complicated, though, when we do the second half of the horizontal flowers.
Namely, we
now have to take them above our shoulders, which means that we have to put a little bit
more energy into them. I kind of think of this as like I'm kind of flinging the poi up
and around and…I don't know if you can–if this reads very much, but I also feel like I do
a little bit of a head check up. Boom! as the poi are going over my shoulders to kind
of make sure that I'm giving my…a little bit of attention from my chin as
the poi are going up there, too, yeah? Alright, so the full combo is as such:
we go ahead and do left over right, open, right over left, open, windmill around to
down, windmill around to down, horizontal flowers underneath, horizontal flowers underneath,
horizontal flowers up above, and horizontal flowers up above. And if you want to finish it
off with one last stall to bring the poi together, cool.
Let's have another look at that in slo-mo Cool! I hope this gets some of you all out there
get more comfortable both with your level changes as well as with stalling out in split time same
direction. We've covered a lot of ways to do that! Before you go, please do me a favor and if you
post video of yourself doing this combo, make sure to tag me I am DrexFactor on both Instagram and
YouTube and I would love to see your hard work! If you got anything out of this video,
please make sure to like, comment, share, and subscribe to help other people find
it, and of course to help my channel grow. This video would not be possible were
it not for the awesome support of all of these wonderful people right here! These
are my Flow Patrons over on Patreon and they, along with the people listed down in the
description, helped to make this video and all the videos on this channel possible.
Thank you one and all for your support! If you out there watching are not currently
a supporter and would like to become one you can do so by heading on over to
patreon.com/drexfactorpoi and signing up! There you will get access to a whole host of awesome
rewards and be helping me out in my mission to bring poi spinning and flow arts to the wider
world.
So go check that out! Please and thank you. If you dug this video and you're hungry for
more of my combo tutorials, I will go ahead and leave a link to a playlist of them
down in the description as well as up on screen if you are watching on YouTube.
Also, the YouTube algorithm thinks that you're really going to like this top video
here, so you might want to give that a look, too. Thank you all so much for watching, make
sure to get out and flow, and I will see you with a brand new video on Monday. Please
take care and I'll see you soon. Peace..