Before Body as Map

Before I began asking where movement could go, I first wanted to understand where movement begins.

At the time, I was less interested in choreography than in the body itself. Why could two dancers perform the same phrase while producing entirely different qualities of movement? Why did certain movements feel continuous while others appeared fragmented?

Those questions gradually led me towards the joint, not simply as an anatomical structure, but as the place where movement first begins to organise itself.

The body is often described through muscles, bones or technique. I became interested in something much smaller. A joint is a meeting point: where force changes direction, where weight is redistributed, where one movement becomes another.

This research developed through reading, studio practice and repeated observation. Instead of searching for ideal positions, I focused on recognising how movement travelled across the body.

The purpose was never to isolate joints. It was to understand how local articulations continuously reorganise the body as a whole.

One of the earliest discoveries in this project was that movement cannot be understood by separating the body into independent components. A shoulder reorganises because of the spine. A hand reorganises because of the shoulder. A pelvis reorganises the entire body.

Nothing moves alone. The body is organised through relationships long before movement becomes visible.

Technical development is often understood as gaining more flexibility, strength or control. This research gradually suggested something different: technique also depends upon perception.

The joint was only the entrance. What first appeared as an anatomical question gradually became a question of attention, perception, memory and experience.

The body was no longer something to analyse. It became a way of thinking.

Many of the ideas that later developed into Mapping Myself, and eventually Body as Map, can already be recognised here in their earliest form. This project remains important not because it provided answers, but because it established the questions that continue to shape my practice.