Glowsticking vs. Poi Spinning

Since coming to grad school, I've been able to join a glowsticking club here. Having done poi spinning and flow arts in college, I thought it would be basically the same. But it was surprisingly hard to swap over into the new style. Figured that I would discuss it a little bit here.

So the history of both practices comes from traditional Maori poi spinning. I know very little about the history, but that's the origin of both. I assume the two branched off fairly recently, and I doubt that either looks much like the original practice, but we've ended up at two slightly different points. Glowsticking involves putting glowsticks on strings and waving them around. Poi are heavier and typically consist of a ball on a string. The resulting composition means that you can do very different tricks with them.

Poi spinning with the heavier prop means that tricks such as isolations and stalls are a little easier. Isolations are a trick where the head of the poi (the ball) appears to stay in one location in space. Stalls are what they sound like, you stall the poi and it creates a visual illusion where the poi stops, and then you can change its direction. Typically poi also translates into fire spinning very well, any trick you can do with poi is basically doable on fire.

Glowsticking is radically different, more of an emphasis is put on wraps than stalls. Wraps are when the spinner will hit themselves with the glowsticks, causing it to bounce back in the other direction. These have basically replaced stalls for changing spinning direction. Because the glowsticks are so light you can do these at very fast paces, which creates a really cool visual effects. But it seems much harder to translate these to fire spinning since you obviously should not smack yourself with the head of a fire poi.

I did some brief Googling for this and found some stuff about conflict between the two groups, or how poi focuses on flow while glowsticking is more technical. This all kinda seems like nonsense to me, there are plenty of technical poi spinners and glowstickers with great flow. It all depends on personal style. And the conflict between the two is just ridiculous, the fields are too similar to that.

So that's a deep dive into my hobby and the various layers of depth to it. I had no idea that glowsticking was an established thing until grad school, a whole new field of spinning has opened up!