Time for something a little bit different. Flowtoys has asked people to put up their "flow stories" on Facebook, and, as I really like Flowtoys, I thought I'd do so, and did. And then I thought "I should edit this a bit and put it on my blog, because I have one, and I ought to use it more." So, here it is.
Prior
to high school, I had very little interest in any physical activity;
I pretty much figured that as long as my body was working well enough
to keep my brain alive, that was good enough. My parents, on the
other hand, were determined that I ought to still get some sort of
regular exercise even after I hit junior year and no longer had to
take mandatory PE. No, they did not introduce me to poi- they decided
I should join the internationally-acclaimed high school rowing crew.
Predictably, I absolutely hated it. But, in the meantime, I had some
friends who did glowstringing, and I thought that was coolest thing
ever and determined to figure it out. The basic butterfly in
particular totally blew my mind. I was totally uncoordinated, and I
accidentally re-invented some basic meteor spinning, having never
heard of it before, just as an excuse to avoid having to use my
cruddy left hand (ironically, I still suck at meteor spinning). From
glowstringing, via YouTube tutorials, I got into poi, and made my own
set by tying shoelaces to tennis balls (flat shoelaces are still my
favorite tethers). After a couple of months, I quit rowing, and I'm
pretty sure my interest in this weird poi thing that at least got me
out of a chair was a significant factor in my parents letting me do
it.
Then I graduated and went off to college. Prior to this
point, I was certain that I hated dancing- I went to exactly two
dances in high school (Junior and Senior Prom) and spun glowsticks.
College gave me a lot more opportunity for dances (residence hall
dances, student association dances, etc.), and, figuring that I ought
to have some way of figuring out how to engage in socialization, I
made myself go to them and got through it with glowsticks.
Eventually, it clicked that poi is dance- just using your arms more
than your feet. Prior to that moment, I had been almost entirely
focused on technical spinning. Afterwards, I found myself opened up
to exploring a whole new world of body movement, and started playing
with freehand light tracing to try to force myself to develop some
"danciness" independent of the motion of the poi.
Looking
for good tutorials on YouTube had led me to Nick Woolsey's videos and
Playpoi. During my second semester at college, Playpoi started
putting out videos on double staff, and I decided I had to figure out
staffs as well. So, the next summer, I got myself some dowel rods
from Home Depot and started playing. From the start, I was fascinated
by the connections between staff and poi patterns, analysing which
patterns would transfer between the two forms, which couldn't, and
why. I still frequently get a lot of my new performance ideas by
learning a new trick with poi and then thinking "what's the
closest I can come to replicating this with a staff?" or
vice-versa.
Then I took two years off from life to serve on a
mission for the LDS Church in Ukraine. In what little free time a
missionary has, I practiced poi with shoelaces tied to tennis balls,
and staffs with broom handles, spare PVC pipe, or whatever was at
hand. During that time, my mom shipped me my first set of two
flowlights- so much better than chemical glowsticks! Having no access
to videos or other spinners for two years, I credit that period with
helping me develop my own sense of style as a simple unavoidable
necessity.
When
I got back and started college again in 2010, I was totally hooked on
flowlights. I got myself oggpoi, crystal cases (still using shoelace
tethers!), and collapsable staffs and went to town out on the lawns
in my apartment complex nearly every night. When I met new people
around campus or new people moved in to my complex between semesters,
it became not uncommon to be greeted with "hey! you're that guy
with the lights!" Based on my glowsticking roots, I took to
using double-ended crystal poi, mixing in techniques from handle
spinning and meteor hammer; I've seen lots of people do tosses with
poi, and even use weighted handles, but nobody outside of the
glowstringing community play with two equally weight ends. One more
thing to add to my personal style.
I heard rumors that there
was another poi spinner in the campus juggling club, and I should go
hang out with them, and I thought maybe that would give me the chance
to finally try out some partner poi stuff- sadly, no luck. Poi is
unloved in the juggling club. But, I did get a ready-made group of
friends who like to do all kinds of other prop-manipulation arts, and
started doing performances for libraries, school groups, the
homecoming parade.... Then in the spring of 2011, I found myself
sitting next to a chocolate fountain at a dance and simultaneously
next to a girl who I was certain was merely waiting for her date to
get back from the buffet table. Turns out, she was single, also drawn
to chocolate fountains, and wondered if I could show her how to spin
lights, 'cause those looked just so awesome! By this point, lots of
people had asked to borrow my lights for a few minutes, or wondered
if I could teach them, or told me how they wished they could do that,
but no one ever followed through for more than 5 minutes. This
particular girl, on the other hand, to my shock and amazement, asked
me to dance, got my phone number, and set up regular weekly poi
spinning lessons. Needless to say, we became friends, and I finally
got my partner-poi-partner.
When summer break came, we talked
on the phone just about every other day, but somehow I did not quite
get the hint. During the next fall semester, though, she finally
managed to convince me that I really wanted to marry her. Seven
excruciatingly long months later, we got married just in time to
shoot our first video for Circles of Light. In the meantime, I had
tried introducing her to staffs, but it just didn't stick like poi
spinning did. That is, until we both realized that, while I had
always been into double staff (because two sticks are more fun than
one), she loved single staff. Thus, I had to learn single staff. And
of course, we had to figure out how to do it as partners. Sadly, my
new mother-in-law was of the opinion that this whole poi spinning
thing was extremely weird, and what is this crazy guy getting my baby
girl into....
Until November, when we found out that, no, we did
not win, but we did get on the 2012 COL DVD! External validation
from an international competition went a long way towards improving
my mother-in-law's opinions.
That fall, some new people had
joined the juggling club- one wanting to learn contact juggling, and
one wanting to sell some contact juggling balls. Thus we gained our
third flow art. I'm still not very good at it yet (being distracted
by the events of the following paragraph), but contact juggling adds
a whole new dimension to the experience of flow arts- it's flow, but
not as we know it, Jim.
Then it was time to start planning for
the next year's video. I initially wanted to merge partner poi with
passing patterns from toss juggling- but our toss-juggling-fu was not
that good. Some day I'm sure it will make for some awesome
performances, but after realizing we weren't going to make that work,
we fell back to the idea of doing partner staff. Having no YouTube
videos to look at for inspiration, we invented our own patterns for
two staffs and two people- a mix of single and double staff
techniques and interconnected patterns that are impossible with only
two hands. In a fit of choreographic panic, we both somehow managed
to go from sort of casually playing around to actually being
competent with a single staff just in time to get a video in the
mail.
A
few weeks later (and just a few weeks ago, by now), we went to a big
week-long family reunion in Island Park, Idaho. One of my brothers,
who has three kids, lives just a couple miles away from me, and my
wife & I have often ended up babysitting for him. Whenever we go,
we've taken to taking our big bag of toys along. As a result, one of
my nephews has taken an interest in contact juggling, both think
staff spinning is pretty cool (one of them is in karate, and does a
totally different kind of staff work), and my two year old niece has
oodles of fun throwing juggling balls. Knowing there would be lots of
kids, we of course took the big bag of toys to the family reunion as
well. There we discovered that one of my other nieces seems to have a
natural talent for contact juggling. One night, we did our video
performance with glow staffs for the whole family, and afterwards
took apart all of our equipment and let all of our (numerous!) nieces
and nephews run around the yard with flowlights and oggs. They were a
pretty big hit! In addition to the personal pleasure that comes from
playing with flowtoys, it's enormously gratifying to see little kids
get so much joy from play with some bright glowing lights and
pretending they're lightsabers or fairy dust or whatever.
I
have high hopes that we are inspiring another generation of flow
artists.
Now, that's the end of my flow art journey (until I go and learn how to do more cool stuff), but I ought to add another little anecdote. Flowtoys has a really fantastic warranty policy, so when one of our spectrum lights started acting funky, I naturally wanted to get it replaced. However, it is nearly time for my wife's birthday, and I also wanted to buy her some new toys. It would be nice if I could the warranty items and the new order all packaged together so I could save a few bucks on shipping... but, oh darn, I waited too long to send stuff in, and there's no way the warranty items are gonna ship soon enough for everything to get to me on time....
Enter Flowtoys' exceptional customer service. Not only did they decide to process and ship out my order in 1 day rather than the expected "up to three" to make sure my wife got her birthday presents on time, they went out of their way to bundle in my warranty items even though my returns hadn't arrived yet. Not only do they make the best equipment you can get, they're really nice people.
Also, Home of Poi: they're based in New Zealand (the actual home of poi), so shipping can be a bit steep, but if Flowtoys doesn't sell it, HOP probably does. I haven't had any personal interaction with HOP employees to evaluate them on, but I do really like their stuff.
