Foundational Lessons

Focusing your Patterns:
If you learn to stabilize your patterns, they will start to look good from the front as well as the side. A 3-beat weave is a great example. If the pattern isn't stable (i.e. in focus) it still looks like a beautiful wheel of light from the side, but from the front it will look a bit messy... but with practice it can look like a helix. This goes for all patterns: The more consistent the pattern, the more it can be appreciated from all angles.
 
If you ever get the chance to play with a mirror... spend some time spinning your planes towards the mirror, and find ways to make the patterns look good. You'll be surprised what you can find.
 
Plane Changes
It's also very good to make dramatic plane changes. This gives you a great way to break your audience into 4 imaginary walls, and to switch between them.
 

Making sound effects while learning a move helps a great deal!  While it may make you feel silly, this will help you to more quickly develop muscle memory for the move by involving more of your senses. 
 

Whether you're learning the three-beat weave and chanting "over, under, back" or "whoosh"ing while practicing pendulums with extended arms, you'll find that the move becomes natural more quickly.  Following are some suggestions for sound effects for specific moves though we strongly recommend that you come up with your own!  The more personalized your sound effect, the more it will help your learning process.

Included here are ideas about learning poi that have come to us over the years.  We've found them helpful for other things as well.  (We'll leave that for you to guess).