Annabel van Baren

Photo: Anna van Kooij

The Map of Thoughts, a solo by Romanian choreographer Maria Baroncea, is like a brain scan from the inside. Maria draws a connection between movements within the brain and the live sounds these movements cause. The solo departs from everyday, sometimes subconscious, movements that are constantly repeated and that can exhaust you. After the performance, a debate was organised with Maria, Matthias Sperling and Henrietta Hale. Unfortunately, the interpersonal, journalistic, emphatic, academic, insightful, and humorous skills of the moderator/interviewer lacked so tremendously, that neither of the three choreographers had any freedom or space to actually say anything vaguely interesting about their creations. The ‘journalist’ appeared on stage with a lengthy set of cards with questions. Thus, predefined questions which she fired off systematically, regardless of which remarks and comments had been sneaked in by eiether three choreographers. I would especially have liked to hear Maria’s decisions and thoughts on her performance – some scenes seemed so cryptic, introvert, and multi-layered that I failed to understand what she was communicating. That is precisely the beauty of The Map of Thoughts: a search for Maria’s persona at that particular time and in that particular space.