The Juggling Equipment Blog

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Hi everyone,

My name is Asaf Mor, I’m 18 from Israel and I’ve been spinning Poi for about 6.5 years. I’ll be posting here about Poi, Staff and anything else that can be spun basically.

Recently, thanks to amazing Poi spinners like Ronan and Cyrille I’ve decided to go into some Contact Poi.  As you can probably guess, Contact Poi is done by combining moves from Contact Juggling into your spinning. I first saw Contact Poi at a workshop by Laura at PLAY 2007, she was doing things closer to Contact Staff and Devilsticks, and I couldn’t find a set of poi that allowed me to do anything remotely interesting involving contact, so I forgot about it for a while.

Until IJC 2009, where I saw Ronan’s mind-blowing performance at the Gala Show, he was doing incredibly difficult moves and making them look effortless, without falling into the typical “Tech-Spinner” problem of standing still while doing difficult moves. His body movement was great and elegant and it complimented his style very well. He’s one of those spinners who don’t need fire, in fact, as he explained in an interview for a DVD, he finds it restricting, and thus he tends to look at poi as object manipulation, rather than fire spinning.

Recently I took that same point of view, trying to figure out what was possible when you’re not restricted by fire, naturally, I started with contact poi, since that’s what got me interested in this type of manipulation. I’ve been doing it for about a month and I’ve learned a few of the moves I’ve seen online, and I’ve also discovered some interesting variations while practicing. This is probably the best thing to happen to Poi in a while, this is yet another mental limit removed from our spinning, and giving us so many new possibilities.

The contact poi I am currently using is basically an 80mm MB Stage ball on one end and a PX3 Play knob on the other hand connected by a polyester rope. If you want to get one for yourself here is a link to the product page on Home of poi

I was going to put a video dedicated to Contact Poi, but I’ve decided to put this post up and upload the video later, so here’s Cyrille, one of the people who inspired me to start doing this:

This week we have a poi video!
It features one of the world’s greatest poi masters – Ronan McLoughlin.
I don’t really know or understand what tricks he’s doing there, but the video itself has a great ambience.
A cosmic and kind of an Indian meditative style was made here gracefully.
Enjoy