Nick Woolsey

Nick Woolsey is a movement educator and performer who transformed poi from an dispersed, largely undocumented practice into a structured learning system. His work bridges online instruction, studio-based technique development, and international workshops, establishing pedagogical frameworks that have shaped contemporary poi education.

Woolsey's engagement with poi began in spring 2001 at Roberts Creek Community Hall on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, where he encountered fire poi at a social gathering. He brought prior experience in tai chi, yoga and dance to the new practice, treating the swinging props as a vehicle for studying rhythm, body organization and expressive movement. In 2003, he released *Dervishly Yers*, a downloadable fire-spinning video that circulated widely in the online poi community, and won a Home of Poi video contest. That visibility led to workshop invitations and two years of intensive travel and exchange.

In fall 2004, Woolsey launched Playpoi in Vancouver, a project that combined a dance studio, instruction, performance and a movement laboratory where participants could use video feedback and light manipulation to study technique. The venture marked a shift from isolated online sharing to integrated, in-person practice environments. Playpoi's educational approach treats poi patterns as learnable systems analogous to music education: fundamental timing, planes, transitions and coordination come before the accumulation of isolated tricks, giving practitioners tools to improvise and form personal style. His beginner and advanced curricula cover reels, weaves, butterflies, footwork, stalls, crosspoints, flowers, rhythm and musicality.

Over subsequent decades, Woolsey toured internationally while distributing lessons online and later through structured long-form courses. His *Adventures in Poi* project compiled performance footage made while traveling, crediting music to Delhi 2 Dublin and videography to Jaguar Mary. Playpoi posts connected tutorial publishing to Leviathan retreats and camps in British Columbia, bringing online study back into shared studio practice. Woolsey also established an explicit distinction between Māori poi traditions in Aotearoa and the contemporary international practice he calls "global fusion poi"—a boundary essential to understanding his work as part of modern fusion and flow-arts culture rather than Māori cultural authority.

By 2026, Playpoi presented hundreds of lessons, step-by-step courses and a summer poi camp, while a separate Flowarts course directory organized his beginner and advanced material into long-form sequences. His influence is therefore less a single performance title than an educational architecture: named concepts, progressive drills, freely circulating videos and intensive gatherings through which poi dancers can analyze and transmit movement.