I have been practicing poi often throughout this month, and I’ve started to make my own poi with tennis balls, but I will work on better ones once a shipment arrives. I’m a little behind on my schedule, so the performance I planned will be posted less than a week into February because I was unable to meet with my mentor this Thursday due to him being sick. I met up with him a week before at his house, where I learned about poi isolations and simple stalls. I also learned about more intermediate spinning tricks. I’ve learned a lot of the tricks quite quickly because some of the movements are similar to ones I do with juggling. I found the stalls a lot harder because it requires a much more precise movement, but I managed to do them fairly well.

Source: http://www.firegroove.com/267-thickbox_default/contact-poi.jpg

My mentor first started learning juggling when he was 14 years old, then he got into more circus skills in general at 16 when a street performer came to run a class at a college. He eventually went to run on class of his own to teach children, teens and adults the circus skills he had learned. Later he attended three different juggling conventions in the UK to meet up with other jugglers. With the experiences he has, he formed a partnership with 6 of others. With that partnership, they performed, ran workshops and taught mainly adults about circus skills.

At 16, he found that circus skills were one of the first things he was willing to work on. He thought that the learning curve for the, didn’t seem too steep, and so he tried every type of juggling he could find. Such as devil sticks, diabolos, unicycles, plate spinning, poi and bounce juggling. He found that he really enjoyed teaching people about these skills and he also really enjoyed performing for others.

From my mentor, I’ve found that showing someone a skill, then explaining how and why it works helps myself to learn quicker. Visual learning helps to teach how a trick should look and can help with figuring out the correct movement for it. I’ve seen that it’s much easier to teach someone who is interested in the topic that they are learning. To make someone more interested in a topic, I think that showing them what level they can achieve in that topic, or telling them about why you (as a mentor) decided to go into that field or topic.

I’m enjoying this more and more as it goes on. I can’t wait to learn harder and more complicated tricks as I go on.