Poiboy in Poland – Poi workshops and Altergrawitacja
After spending about 18 hours on trains, I arrived in Krakow and met my friend Cyrik. We went to his place to drop off our stuff, then headed out to eat and go to the first workshop.
That workshop went quite well (apart from a delay of one hour, which we used for some free practice), with all 5 students learning some new things on each subject. We then went back to Cyrik’s place to eat, sleep and watch some videos from KFF that found their way to the internet.
The next day I headed to the workshop on my own, since Cyrik couldn’t make it, but a new student took his place. The second workshop also went great, building up on what we did in the first workshop with throws, floats, contact poi, and performance.
Me and Cyrik spent my third day in Krakow wandering around the city since I needed to replace my bag and my wallet, both fell apart before or during my visit to Krakow. After that I got on a train headed for a festival called Altergrawitacja in Torun.
The Warsaw West train station was a bit confusing, after finding out what platform my train leaves from, I waited a very long time since it was delayed. I arrived in Torun at about 3AM, met Joanna, the organizer, who took me to my hotel room (by hotel I mean castle.) Torun is a beautiful town, the old city is especially amazing.
The first day of the festival I spent mostly getting to know Torun and meeting some of the local spinners. I also ran into Tavo, a juggler who was staying in Israel and visiting our juggling meets for a pretty long time. The fire show that was supposed to happen that day got cancelled due to rain, so I went to the
Hotel in Torun. Amazing city, amazing poi, amazing people.
gym with everyone to get a really good practice session.
I also taught a workshop on throws, which was a bit chaotic due to constant relocations thanks to the rain, but still good.
I’ve also managed to do the first half of my dream move with contact poi pretty clean, so I’m happy about that.
The second day after waking up and eating I taught my contact poi workshop, this time at the festival area. The workshop went well, I even got to teach arm roll switches. The gala show was great, my favorite act was by far Tavo, who did amazing 1, 2 and 3 ball body rolling. The rest of the gala had everything from contortion to aerial to juggling.
The fire open stage which I performed in was also pretty good, though some of the very good spinners didn’t feel like going on, which was a shame.
Big thanks to Cyrik for hosting me, to Magda for letting me use her studio for the workshops, to Joanna and Eimhinn for inviting me to Altergrawitacja, and to the spinners and jugglers at the festival for being awesome.
I am now in Berlin with Maya, we found a new friend to stay with at the last minute thanks to Tom.
More updates (and video notes from the workshops) will come soon.
Happy spinning,
Poiboy
Your perfomance on a fire show was awesome! Looking forward to your next visit in Toru? (I hope you’ll come for Altergrawtacja next year!)
And still got your autograph on my pencilcase ]:->
Good luck in spinning!
Keep on kickin’ ass bro! keep it top notch and remember this oldie : “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” …
Best of luck, hugs
Tom