Jenny De Leon presents a new solo work: Thus To Fling Her Soul at TAPAC. The

title is drawn from poetry, by Thomas Hardy…  

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
    In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling her soul
    Upon the growing gloom.

As part of her PhD, De Leon plumbs the depths of her journey as dancer,
choreographer, teacher, dance psychotherapist, mother, daughter, and friend, to
bring a work that portrays a life of ‘giving’ with every fibre of one’s being. Personally,
I have not been so emotionally impacted since watching Maya Plisetskaya in The
Dying Swan more than four decades ago.
Since the opening breath as this tiny, gracious figure stepped out with the ‘intent’
Martha Graham speaks about, DeLeon draws you into a sacred undertaking that
exposes a heart, a spirit yearning, hungering for more.
Transdisciplinary in its endeavour; De Leon’s choice of accompaniment in sound,
music, voice, lighting, costuming, backdrop, and, last but by no means least, theatre:
this work in three distinct parts, explores aging, vulnerability, endurance, and grace.
De Leon does not play someone else as she moves but lets us into her very self and
one cannot help but feel every emotion she conveys. Self-disciplined to her core,
each articulation, each sculpted movement, speaks of her experience and searching
not only into the art of dance but into the struggle every human confronts at
sometime in their walk upon this earth.
Because of De Leon’s ability to give so generously of herself, us, the watchers, get
to see, to hear, to think, and to feel what her work roots and grounds itself in. Those
of us who want to see, see a pure transparency in each intentional, unintentional,
progressive, recessive enunciation of a piece that even now, she sees as a ‘work-in-
progress’; one that will change and grow and perhaps, diminish as she continues
towards a kind of endlessness, an infinity, a never-ending story.
In Part One, the Monks of Dip. Tse Chok Ling Monastery with their Prayers of
Forgiveness set the scene and mood of a persistent longing, a craving, an aching, a
hungering for this seemingly illusive aspiration. When their bells begin to ring, my
own knees wish to kneel in the holiness they convey.

Dressed in the exquisite costuming of Olga Khimitch, De Leon mirrors the chanting
of the brothers in her movements, while the sensitivity of the lighting expert, Isaac
Hansen follows her and etches her every definitive step.
Madness, insanity, despair, frenzy drives Part Two with Mogwai’s My Father, My
King, and while the lighting takes us into the twilight of growing dusk, De Leon
dresses herself in black to further set the gloomy atmosphere. Before she leaves the
stage and as Mogwai’s music fades, the angelic voice of Karen Plimmer emanates
from backstage in her own composition written specially for this work. She fills the
auditorium with a sense that we are hearing from another realm and creates a rare
fluidity of transition into Part Three.
This is where, De Leon’s metamorphosis crests, as she enters clothed in her
daughter, Gwen De Leon’s creation in sheer cobalt blue. Brett Dean’s One of a Kind,
Act Three informs the sense of acquiring the kind of grace that this entire work
hinges upon. And, in every part of a dancer’s being, she moves in this grace as if
transported to an unseen realm. The most beautiful part of this transportation is that
she takes us with her.
Dean’s music and the lights fade as we see De Leon disappearing from our view but
not from the stage, as she continues relentlessly, her endless journeying into its
‘non-conclusion’. We only know that she has finished, for now, when her footsteps
can no longer be heard. And the old cliché ‘you could have heard a pin drop’, defines
the next several moments as the audience sits transfixed. Waiting breathlessly for
someone else to applaud, I finally gave in and began to clap as the spotlight found
her, watched her leave the stage for a moment, to bring her singer, Plimmer
onstage, before she surrendered in gratitude to her audience.
The sense of having been cleansed in the way that Picasso expresses when he said,
‘Art has a way of washing from our soul the dust of everyday life’, did not leave me
even when I left the theatre, the centre, the carpark and began the drive home.

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