So, these journey maps have been most of the food for creating material. They do indeed seem to offer endless possibilities, and there are so many different ways to approach translating the drawings into moving. Here are a few of the maps that have been investigated over the past few weeks.

Rohanna's map - 'flocking and hanging'

This map was one that Rohanna was working with. Her reading of it gave rise to the work on hanging, and flocking. The top section, seems to be like a hanger from which a large dense mass is hung. This dense mass had a circular quality and had a feeling of the image of a huge flock of birds swirling and swooping. Circling, dispersing and regrouping…

'The Signature' or 'Skull Rocking'

The image to the right was popular. Tamar, Jennifer and Elena all chose to work with it – despite two books full of maps! It happens also to be one of my favourites. By contrast with the flocking map, this one seems much more contained and complete. All 3 dancers had very  different interpretations of the map. Jennifer named it ‘Skull Rocking’, Tamar, called it ‘The Signature’…

jagged outlines...the page runs out before the end. Jennifer's Map

This was the first map that Jennifer worked with. With this image I was interested to see what selection of images, qualities, textures, intentions Jennifer could see. From this collection of words, I asked Jennifer to try and extract the essence of each movement idea – pare it down and refine – a process of distillation. Some ideas were discarded along the way, some have remained, including ‘the jagged outlines’ motif and the entity that came from ‘the pages runs out before the end’ which I call tumbling/falling…

Robot lady - Elena's map

This was one of Elena’s Maps. I think it looks like a crazy woman dancing. She sees it more of a robot dance! Again, like the signature, this drawing has more of a complete, contained quality than some of the others.