Cork’s annual festival makes an invigorating return to presenting large-scale performance with a production that involves 11 dancers, four onstage musicians and three opera singers. In The Wanderer (★★★★☆) from Irish Modern Dance Theatre, an international cast traces multiple journeys by migrants across continents. Choreographed by John Scott against a background of globe-spanning projections by dance film artist Jason Akira Somma, the dancers weave intricate paths, cleave together and fall apart; switching from propulsion to entropy. Poet Jessica Traynor’s text presents a dense collage of voices: from interviews with the dancers about their stories of migration and homesickness, to literary reflections on exile.
Tom Lane’s score for voice, strings and delicate piano is similarly allusive, with echoes of Max Richter as well as the lonely wanderer from Schubert’s Winterreise. In the final movement, “A Woman and Death”, soprano Mairéad Buicke is lifted from her hospital bed and cradled by the dancers. If at times a desire to make a universal statement on the plight of refugees dilutes the particularity of individual experience expressed in movement and voice, its flashing moments of beauty and yearning ensure that this ambitious production makes a lasting imprint.
