I've been working for years on the idea of how to most express the instrument of me as a poi fire dancer. One aspect of the process of developing your inner poi dance performance artist has been focusing on it from a scientific/logical perspective in a "fake it till you make it" sort of way -- that is, to mechanically practice the movements from the perspective of the 7 Layer Dip we use at Temple of Poi so that as the ideas/concepts/practices of this tool become more ingrained in the body as movements which do not require thought (unconscious integration/competence), they will naturally flow forth as the artist dances.

The 7 Layers of the Dip are, from bottom (widest) to top (narrowest) in the shape of a pyramid are:

• Skills
  
• Size
  
• Height (these two are pretty interchangeable)
  
• Speed
  
• Motion
  
• Rhythm and Flow
  
• Dramatic Presence

Certainly it all starts with a basic skill -- a la the weave. But what you can do with the weave itself is endless in terms of variations -- change the size of it, the height, the speed, how you move with it -- then vary the rhythm with which you present it and put some dramatic sprinkles on top and suddenly, you've got yourself something you never had before in terms of the visual impact.

As a very basic example, you can think of these ideas as the reason that the artist might get (and often does) applause simply for doing a backbend in front of a crowd (especially a less educated/experienced crowd) while doing the weave or buzzsaw. That's not to say that if you show it to another spinner they will see you doing anything other than a 3 beat weave on a technical level because the skill, regardless of presentation, is still the skill.

Instead, what I'm suggesting that as important as a varied set of skills is, the ability to express those skills in various ways with a unique style is perhaps a higher degree of skill than to simply be able to do the move itself because:
- skills are endless -- that is, no matter how much you know, there is more to learn; no matter how many tricks you can do, there are always more tricks to do; this is why the skills are at the root/base of the pyramid.
- while the skills are most fundamental, they are least significant in terms of you personally expressing your style as a dance performance artist, which is why dramatic presence -- the unique essence of you as a performer -- is the smallest thing and at the top of the pyramid -- least fundamental and most significant and built on top of everything else.
- the way in which you explore everything in between and including those two parts is what differentiates you. That is, I can teach just about anyone a weave. However, how you perform that weave is the thing that only you can bring to the performance because how you think, move and express your being through your body is uniquely yours to bring to the world...