Handmade Hoops by Peachysteve

Three Beat Weave

Taken from Chapter 3 of
"Hooping"
An Instructional DVD by Peachysteve

The three beat weave is most commonly thought of as a poi spinning move.
This move is found in many disciplines where objects are manipulated, either for performance or as part of martial training.
It's been around for thousands of years and most probably was never traditionally done with poi by Maoris.
I've been teaching this movement for the past 20 years and I've tried numerous ways to explain and teach it.
What I've learned is that this move is easier to do than it is to understand.
The body falls into this movement with little encouragement but if the brain is engaged it can go wrong in so many ways.
I'm not able to teach it here as I'd need to be with you, pointing and shouting.
So I'm going to explain it and ask you not to think about it but just to do it.

This starts in exactly the same way as the two beat weave. My right hand leads and my left hand starts when my right is outstretched and crossing over.
My right arm circles across the body and my left arm follows it.
Now I'm going to do something different. My left hand is across my body and the hoop is starting to rise. Now I'm going to release my grip on the hoop so that I can do...
A cross body thumb roll. When I do the thumb it helps for me to stop moving the hoop through space and just let it roll on the thumb. So I have to make a larger circle around the circling hoop with my right arm.
You can see that my right arm is much higher than usual because of that larger circle. I'm now catching up the left hand hoop and the circles are returning to normal size again.
Now my right arm is across the body and getting ready for its thumbroll.
My left arm now draws a large circle around the right hand as it thumbrolls.
My left hand regrips the hoop and I carry on.
Here you can see it in sketchy motion. See how the thumbroll takes the space while the other hoop draws around the outside.

My best advice when learning this move is this;
Identify the hand which comes over the top in your two beat weave (in my examples it's my left)
When it comes over, make it do a thumbroll. Don't think about anyting else.
Don't worry about where the other hoop goes, or where the space is going to come from.
Everything may crash together but do it again. If it works one time then the over the top arm will have switched and you'll be focusing on the other arm.
Just keep at it, thumbroll left, thumbroll right, thumbroll left, etc.
Try not to think about the complexities.

As you get more comfortable with the move, the accentuation of the circles is diminished and you can keep it tight if you want to.
If you learn to do this move in reverse and want to turn it'll help to go back to slightly larger circles again to learn it.
In my DVD I now go through all the moves in reverse and then move on to show how to change between forward and reverse weaves.
As it's quite specialised and most hoopers will want to focus more on horizontal hooping I'm going to move on and may come back to it later.