Wanderlust by Leigh Warren & Dancers, in association with Uno Man. The Playhouse, October 11 and 12.
Tabi ni yande
Yume wa kareno o
Kakemeguru
On a journey, ailing -
My dreams roam about
Over a withered moor.
According to Makoto Ueda, this was the last poem written by the master haiku poet Matsuo Basho shortly before his death in 1694.
I think “wanderlust” is too heavy a title, sounding too Germanic like something from Wagner, for a dance work inspired by the life of the Japanese poet who, says Ueda, developed the principle of "lightness", a dialectic transcendence of sabi. Sabi urges a person to detach themselves from worldly involvements; "lightness" makes it possible for them, after attaining that detachment, to return to the mundane world. Maybe Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) is the European equivalent.
However, what Leigh Warren’s team have achieved - himself and Uno Man (directors /choreographers), Tetsutoshi Tabata and Nic Mollison (visuals and lighting designers), India Flint (costumier), Stuart Day (composer) and dancers Deon Hastie, Mako Kawano, Jo Roads and Tomohiko Tsujimoto - is a remarkable work in which sound, movement and texture are displayed in a clean plain setting, illuminated both literally and metaphorically in ever-changing shapes, colours and intensities of light, according to the dreams which we may imagine to have roamed about Basho’s mind, not just on the travels he wrote about, such as in the most famous The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi), but throughout his life.
Especially I was impressed by the dancers’ lightness of touch in scenes representing great variations of mood, befitting the poet’s experiences. From floor to full stretch, from dazzling speed to deliberate measured pace, from tiny fingers vibrating to slow waves of total bodies rippling, all seemed as if without weight, abstracted, beyond the mundane: poetic. We Australians left the theatre, as we should, knowing Basho’s feeling when he wrote after his first journey in 1685:
Toshi kurenu
Kasa kite waraji
Hakinagara
Another year is gone -
A travel hat on my head,
Straw sandals on my feet.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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