UltraPoi Sponsor Code "drexfact0r" to Save

My name is Ben "Drex" Drexler and I'm a world-renowned movement artist, circus performer, dancer, and teacher. Since I launched my YouTube channel in 2008, I have accumulated over 11 million views with more than 100,000 subscribers throughout the world. For me teaching is a passion, vocation, and an act of empowerment for both my students and myself.

I first encountered poi and the Flow Arts at Burning Man in 2006. The fire dancers there overwhelmed me with spectacle and I decided that I wanted to learn how to do it myself. I asked around to my friends after getting home whether we knew anybody who did "that fire thing" that we'd seen at the Burn and finally one friend responded "what...you mean poi?" I found someone to teach me basics, but I was a poor student. What made the pieces come together for me was both my roommate gifting me a set of poi to practice with regularly and finding a community of people that met regularly to flow out at Confluence Park in Denver. I made friends, learned new things, and I was hooked!

My primary prop is poi. As a poi spinner, I spent the first 7-8 years of my flow journey focusing on Tech Poi, or the study of poi as a mathematical system with an emphasis on rational, complex poi ideas with highly technical tricks developed by seeing poi through the lens of trick frameworks. The last 7 years my focus has switched over to poi/dance fusion and specifically finding ways to fuse together the technical poi tricks I learned in the first part of my career with the expressive and storytelling techniques of Contemporary Modern Dance. Throughout my career, however, I've had a focus on my role in this community as an educator, seeking to find ways to teach the art that are intuitive, accessible, and above all inspire my students' curiosity to learn more.

My favorite spot is in the park across the street from where I live. I like having flat pavement to move and dance on and there's a spot in the parking lot of the park right next to the preserved historical house of the person who once owned the property in the area circa the late 1800s that I enjoy dancing in the most.

I would describe my style of flow as Technical Expressionism. While Tech Poi inspired me for much of my early career, I also found it in the long run to be a little too cold and rational. Frequently it produces results that are only clear in the mind of the performer and I feel like this can alienate the audience. In the dance world, I found that movement could exist not just to impress but also to emote. While I think there is a lot of potential in performing difficult poi moves and tricky transitions, I also think my job as a performer above all is to connect with the audience through our common humanity and experience. They're more likely to care about an obscure movement art if the person performing it makes them feel something than if they see a novel curiosity performed through it. The poi side of my dance is most heavily inspired by G, from whom I have taken the tendency toward using really rapid and percussive plane breaks and stalls to accent the music as well as from Ivan "Mel" Gorbunov, from whom I've taken my approach to pacing with moments of great tension and release. As a dancer, my biggest influence is the dancer I trained under, Kelly King.

I'm very passionate about the potential for dance as a tool to bring more people into the Flow Arts or make them curious about it. In general I love discovering new ideas and finding intriguing ideas from outside the Flow World and bringing them into the Flow World. I think I have helped bring quite a lot of new people into the Flow Arts by making education and the art itself more accessible. I want to inspire people to explore their own creative potential not just in learning tricks but also to be able to explore poi as an emotional and artistic outlet.

How has it not touched my life? It's given me purpose, shown me I had more potential than I could have ever imagined, kept me super fit even into my 40s, given me a gateway into understanding math, and introduced me to some pretty incredible people. The Flow Community has the power to change lives. It has the power to make people feel seen, smart, beautiful, talented, and at home. I hope that I am able to inspire people to check it out, give them the tools they need to get started on the journey, and continue to give them ideas as their journey progresses.