So, my progress with the staff has hit a bit of a stalling point.  I’ve become fairly adept at the modified wall plane rotor that I was taught, and have managed to slip in the act of throwing it in the air and catching it again.  I even figured out how to roll it over my shoulder, catch it, and spin it above my head.  I feel really accomplished for having gotten these down as well as I have.  Next up I’m going to be working on a Halo then an Angel Spin.  But first, I need to learn to do a really basic figure eight.

Unfortunately, because I learned a modified version of the wall plane rotor, its making basic moves more difficult to learn.  For example, one of the first things anyone should learn is how to do a figure eight.  This move keeps the staff in motion and allows you to transition it from one movement to another.  I need to figure out, on my own, if its easier to modify every other move I learn to accommodate the method I am currently using, or if I want to go back to the drawing board.  For the sake of the next few weeks of blogging, I will carry on with the method I am currently using, but in the future I will l likely try to copy the more traditional methods and see if that works any better for me.

A wall plane rotor is essentially a forward facing spin.  The Wall is imaginary, and is essentially your front side that the audience sees most clearly.  The plane is that I keep the rotation along that wall, and the rotor is that the staff is spinning.  So this basically means I am spinning the staff on a flat plane infant of me so that the staff presents the most of itself to the audience.

What I am trying to figure out now is the figure eight move, which allows me to spin the staff in a forward pattern, which means it is pointed infront of me and spinning along my sides rather than infront of me.  My big limitation here is my own endurance.  At the moment I can only handle 5-7 minutes at a time, and thats not enough time to build this into muscle memory.  The other complication is that I am not nearly as coordinated for this as I imagined myself to be, and so I tend to clip my shins or swing too far wide.

For an idea of what I am using as a tutorial the following link is the one I have been using for the basics.