Using Inspiration Creatively

Hence the try....

I might attempt something similar. But I think I can use your way of thinking about things to rationalise quite a lot of what I see. Thanks.

mcp: Good quote as well.

Danny, we have been working on this. We have been researching mind map (tree) and wiki programs. As far as I know no one has already started a poi moves tree but we've got a list going on the Poi Theory of Everything. Interested in collaborating? I am going to go send you the log in information from the account.

I had a poi mind map in tree-shape a few years ago - was working on it when drew posted his families and things in...2003? It was already on A1 and nearly overflowing, and that was before many concepts now in use were even thought of. I might go and see if it is still in a box somewhere. it would be funny to see now, i think...

re megs quote;
there is much current debate over whether "a highly developed skill in compilation." IS actually a form of creativity.

A lot of the new media people are creating with, and some old media- music- being done in new forms- dissasembles all sorts of things; pulling tiny elements of them out,to make their palette or building blocks, then reassembling and combining into something new. But actually, the end creation is completely compliled from others material and sources. Only the act of comiling and reassembling is new.

At first i thought this kind of adroit compilation was not creative, in fact was a little cheeky cop out. But now, a decade or two later, particularly looking at what is being done with music, video cuts, and found object jewellery --i think it actually has become its own form of creation.A fascinating one, cause you can see history in it too!

Now i just am interested in how skillfully it is done, and does the sum of the parts add up to something more? If so, good art. Or dance, or poi...

Sorry if that is too much of a tangent you guys!

One thing that totally influenced my earlier years of training was unhinged emotional state!!
I found a intense relief from my crazy life and emotions by spinning an throwing my staffs,
the faster i spun my staffs and the higher i threw them the more relief i got,
i really felt i could totally express my dark angry negative side and turn it into something positive and (to me at least) beautiful.
Often after snorting far to much coke i would avoid parties full of people talking coked up nonsense and go out to my local park in the early hours of the morning, and spin for hours not caring about posture or technique or anything other than making myself feel better by waving and throwing my sticks around. This kind of deep and very personal self expression is what i consider to be my most artistic time of training.
When I was not coked up I would be less frantic but my ultimate goal was always to make myself feel better about my life and my craziness, it worked,
keep this to your selves but on a number off occasions i would have tears streaming down my face(totally sober) somehow the movements, repetition and expression i got from the staffs allowed me to feel extremely sad and extremely happy at the same time. Whilst the staffs didn’t cure my drug and emotional issues on their own they certainly helped me to have more positive stuff in my life which gave me the strength to totally sort my head out.
The ego boost of being able to do cool dangerous looking stuff in front of my coked up mates was nice as well As I slowly sorted my head out and things changed, i met more jugglers and realised that i could make a living doing this weird thing i been taught by a hippy on a beach somewhere(bundy!), i also began to train to perform and trying to create tricks that were pleasing to watch as well as pleasing to execute.
Fortunately for me high throws and fast spinning is very entertaining so its seemed to me from early on i was onto a winner, i got great feedback from people who are still heroes of mine (Jago in particular) i now make my living from what you used to be a weird sort of therapy!
what i lost through that process ,(learning the basics of how to perform) was the deep crazy expressive places i could take myself to. I can sometimes mange to get the old craziness back but now im a happy chilled out type of a bloke i tend to get different less intense but equally pleasurable kind of high
When i perform my solo show now, i try very hard to express to my audiences a glimmer of the love i have for what i do and the phenomenal positive effect it has had on me,
i am obviously restricted by the same constraints as every other performer but if i can sneak a little bit of my soul into my shows then i feel great and people seem to love it. The best compliment people can give me is when they tell me they like watching my show because i clearly enjoy it as much as they do(even if sometimes im pretending cos im tired and would rather be in the pub

back up the thread to the workshops discussion, i agree there is nothing wrong with just wanting to learn a few tricks but i also agree it would be great if more people went on their own weird creative journey rather than learning lots of tricks of somebody else.
Personally i see peoples tricks as the biggest part of their style and then way they deliver them as a much smaller part of it.
Sorry for the bad englishy and the rant
You all smell of poo
Xxx
Xx
x

Damn, good thread. I especially like the title which describes the way I attempt to spin.

Get inspired by watching a video or reading a thread, then get creative by taking what I've learned and making it my own, so to speak.

I can't say that in the six years I've been spinning, that I've ever invented anything. Sure, I've come up with ways of doing or presenting a move and I've come up with quite a few "combos" but so far, everything's been driven strictly by inspiration.

My oppinion, it's not really worth to invent bysicle.
To think of something new you must have at some knowledge about what've been done before and then use it as a start point.

Really? Cos I see style as the complete opposite. (And in fact further, but that's a topic in another thread.)

are you gonna start the new thred pleasee lass,
ima bit drunk

it's in one of those threads about dance / movement or individuality, one of those. Might be on my dvd too, can't remember right now...

Is it even possible be a cookie cutter spinner? Maybe. It's really hard not to let your own style shine through. Even if you just stand in one place while doing ultra tech moves, you still have style.

Workshops and online tutorials are a great place to start. I don't think that they promote a generic style of spinning. Yeah sure they teach concepts like antispins, cateyes, isolations, etc that eveyone will be playing with. But the more people you introduce to a concept the more chance there is that they will take that concept and make it their own. Eventually the ideas that we consider technical today will become the bread and butter of spinning tomorrow. And with that the art advances as a whole.

Firedrums is a good example: you have all these amazing spinners sharing their art and next thing you know you see them again next year taking those same concepts that they learned last year and applying them in new and interesting ways.

Of course these are just frameworks for manipulating props. You can do whatever you like. Who cares? Have fun with it.

When it comes down to it, why wouldn't I learn how to do everything in the book? I don't think that you should limit yourself because your afraid of not being creative enough.

To me spinning about having fun.

It is indeed possible to become a cookie cutter spinner, if you watch enough of a short base of spinners, steal movements from their routines theres a good chance you'll end up modelling your own movement off theirs.

In fact, its quite natural to be a cookie cutter spinner in your early-intermediate development. During the intermediate development its quite possible to teach people in a much different way. Rather than teaching movements you teach a concept and apply it to known movements. I'll try to teach something new as well, but not actually teaching it, just making them apply the concepts to work it out for themselves then trying to scaffold them into finding something similar but different again. Maybe I'll just show them once so that they get the idea but have to take more steps to get to the point where they can do it.

*all of the above is 1 on 1 teaching... I don't get to teach workshops.*

But the difference is trying to include the learner in inquiry based learning whereby they can set their own goals and progress without the aid of a teacher and as such can progress in their own direction with any new material, even if its simple as using a few basic flourishes while doing a hip reel or hip reel/extension combo or as complex as new directions in line iso, plane changing, etc.

"Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand."




I do not follow this at all unless you were talking about collective consciousness, but I doubt you were.

bls337:
The thing about not seeing enough people is that you are not aware of a different way of spinning. I have noticed here at Rhodes. Most people who all learned in the last few years tend to spin very similarly. Now, the way that they spin looks very cool, but you can see that they all learned from the same source.

Especially if you compare the way I spin to them, they are very different. I also tend to try new things more than most, I think.

In short, without actually seeing a different way of spinning, it is very hard to let any sort of creativity shine through, unless their heads are wired in the right way to want to try new things, which many people are not. (Compare how many people spin [well] and how many actually push the boundaries and innovate.)

So yeah, cookie cutter is possible for many people.

I was thinking along the lines that people will innovate and find new and interesting ways of using those concepts. Everyone brings something different to the table and will take those ideas and apply them to their own skillset. The more people working on something the greater chance of innovation. Something like that...

I'm still trying to figure out what I think... but I'm sure my opinion will always change.

That does work, to an extent.

Like I said, you need those people to be wired in a particular way to actually try and push things. Also, unless you are showing them stuff that is not overly well-known, they are quite likely to end up re-inventing what has already been done.

Mostly because what has been done is mostly the "obvious" stuff. Once you know the concept.
Very few people will be able to come up with something radically new. Or at least, that is what I have seen....

Re bansheeCat
re megs quote;
there is much current debate over whether "a highly developed skill in compilation." IS actually a form of creativity.

Hmmmm, just came across this again, and had a think about it. Yep, I don't doubt that mashup and remix culture is creative, sometimes extremely so, and I do love a lot of it's products and it takes skill and craft to make their works. And that you can create entirely new works out of old, and that the new works are also art.

But for one: I don't think we are dealing with the same level of 'taking' as remix culture is. With found objects, you have a perfect copy of the object to use, itself, the same with music and video. (quality not being such a big issue) However with spinning, you have no copy of the trick to use, first you have to learn it, in order to copy it. So you are stealing an imperfect copy.

It would truly be interesting to see a remix routine, consisting of very rigourous immitation of all the originals styles and moves, blended together into an uber routine, so clean and clear that you could identify the original sources youtube videos.

However with music and other things the original source is usually very clear. Not so with this case.

secondly: Ask yourself if when you saw an inspiring artwork or beautiful music and it was created as an original vs one created with found objects or as a remix, which one you would think had taken more work, more creativity, more time and more thought to create.

I realise that the source materials for remix art can play a profound role in it's meaning and expression, but really I haven't seen much spinning that says anything, so that point is a bit moot.

Plus obviously a peice of remix art can be more profound and more enlightening than an original or the sources it uses, but one has to ask if the artwork would have been possible without the sources or the found objects, just with more work for the artist? I guess that's not the point thou really....

Wow,

Hmm..

I tried to read as much of this as I could be here's what I got.

A long time ago (is like 5 years ago a long time?) I used to teach people tricks when I taught workshops. It was kind of all I knew. Also I had some screwed up conception that if I knew a lot of tricks and techniques, people would think I was cool or talented or whatever.

Which I believe is the biggest problem in spinning is many people don't really think about deep questions like, why they spin, Do most of us think if people where not watching would most firedancers do still spin?

So at that point I was always seeking validation for my actions, and altogether I was pretty boring and lacked a fair bit of creativity. (even though sometimes I doubt how much I have now) I hung out in obtuse geek partner poi circles where we did a hell of a lot more talkig and not enough practicing.
I was confused about why I was spinning/juggling in the first place.

Now I know why I juggle/spin, I like the challenge of working to learn something difficult and then finding ways to make it easier for others to learn (like that classic, crusty old spinner saying, " oh it took me years to learn that and you 5 minutes) I am not a huge fan of performing and such but I realize it is a part of the whole thing.

So in terms of how I teach now? I pretty much do most of what blue said a long time ago in the thread. I want everyone to learn a few tricks but to have those tricks be the foundation for them to understand something more deeply.

i.e. - I can teach stalls as ways to transition that allows you to change poi timing and direction. That statement alone goes over the head of most people. Not that they can't understand it intellectually, but they are interested (creatively) in differeny things; whether performance, tech, showing off whatever. Who am I to judge reasons why people spin (even though sometimes its hard not to say something)

What the important thing for me is to not limit what others think of themselves when I teach workshops, even if in my own jaded crusty spinner mind I think their style/tech is totally not compatible ultimately with mine.

Whatever, I hope that had a point

Some good ones.

Thanks for the post.

kind-a felt weird about the dissing of "cookie cutters" and thought it'd be worth a thread on it's own

we look at someone/something and get inspired... we got this "awe" moment... and then?

is it that we want to put ourselves into that same position and get "awed" at? is this why we started spinning poi/staff?

btw I often feel more inspired by the way of transporting individual or a set of moves than by the moves themselves... but that's just me.

Meanwhile I got aware that most of the time I'm just standing on the beach, repeating moves and sets... until in a performance (or when practicing for the same) I start dancing and they just ooze out... as a part of the dance...

only my 2cts worth...