So I found myself in a restaurant today with an unlit cigarette in my mouth, as a hired dancer attempted to knock it out of my lips using Boleadores, aka Argentine Poi... below is the footage, taken by my very enthusiastic waiter, who put me in this situation before i really knew what was going on... Then all of a sudden i'm standing in front of dozens of people as a pair of wood balls at the end of a fast moving rope are inching closer to my teeth... hmmm...
I'm a poi devotee, along with a bunch of my closest friends, we're all students and practitioners of the fire arts, which are not unlike what these Boleadores are. Boleadores are actually rope tools used by cattle rustlers in the Argentine plains, the famed patagonian pampas, filled with the South American cowboys commonly called gauchos. Gauchos have a unique culture, rife with unique accessories and paraphernalia, and you have to admit, there's something immensely appealing about the idea of a South American cowboy astride a horse, riding down the sunset with the Andes in the background... that's probably the gayest sounding thing i'll write all week... at least I hope it is... anyhow, the boleadores are a Gaucho tool, and I imagine the way they developed was similar to how Poi developed. If you've never seen poi, they're essentially just weights at the ends of ropes, and were originally used by the aborigines & native Australians as weapons of war. Below is a youtube link to a couple of my buddies on Foster Beach in Chicago demonstrating what we use poi for today: a combustible war dance of elements encompassed in a startlingly beautiful movement meditation.... there's some fire hoop by Shorty and some staff in there for good measure, along with a video of my long lost buddy Banyan throwing down some double fire staff elegance somewhere in Asia...
these gauchos don't have anything on my crew... ;-)
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