As part of my continued embedded journalism project with IJAD dance, I wanted to have a look at some of the origins of the dance ideas and how they fit into my own ideas about Arabic experiences.

Since a lot of the performance on the 30th is supposed to be based on the astronomy objects of Arabic origin in the Science Museum, I headed over there on Sunday to see what the collection looked like. I wanted to compare the patterns and designs on the astronomy instruments with patterns and designs I’ve seen whilst traveling in Arabic countries – Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Oman, and the UAE. You can see some of these patterns from Oman in a previous blog.

There’s quite a few pieces of the Science Museum collection that have arabic origins. They are all metallic- brass and silver, and most are circular in nature. The only frustrating thing was that the pieces were all so far behind glass that it was difficult to see the details. Fortunately, there were some screens with close ups. Here’s some snippets of photos from the museum’s collection- with a very low screen quality!

Here’s some digital line drawings that I did in Illustrator based on the above photos.

And here’s what I’m comparing them to – some snippets of patterns and designs from Arabic countries:

Then I did some digital line sketches of the patterns seen above.

I then did some work combining the two to see what patterns linked up.

Finally, I added colour to the sketches. I stuck with warm colours based on the energy I felt while attending the rehearsal last week.

Tomorrow I’m off to a workshop, and I’m so excited to see the performance next week!!

Keep up by following my blog or by looking out for the #InfiniteReach hashtag on social media.

You can learn a bit about what I’m getting myself into on the IJAD dance company website, and make sure you start following them on twitter@IJADdance .