Sydney Dance Company’s Somos (Spanish for ‘We are’) premiered three years ago and is now in its 2025 Melbourne season. The venue is a black box rehearsal space in the Arts Centre, which is called The Showroom for performances. It is the perfect room for this piece.
The audience sits three rows deep on all four sides of a rectangular stage with a mirrored floor, edged with a warm LED strip. Initially, a screen of blood-red gauze strips with hazy lighting clouds our vision, as dancers step through the strips and stalk, stroll or sit to a soundtrack of Madrid street life and traffic clattering, with birds and insects humming. No one is more than a few metres from the action, so we are all involved, and sometimes close enough to touch the dancers as they pass to get on or off stage.
The blood-red gauze lifts before the main part of the work, so we are not separated from the dancers, and the lighting is dramatic and effective.
Spanish songs are Somos’ soundtrack throughout, except for Nina Simone’s version of Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ at the end. The songs, whether from contemporary Spanish performers (Rosalía, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Buika, Arca) or older, established singers (Chavela Vargas, Lola Beltrán, the Dino Saluzzi Trio, with that ‘soul instrument’, the bandoneón, front and centre) combine flamenco, rancheros, tango, contemporary blends and references. All have themes of passion, loss and longing, the yearning for connection, the intensity experienced with other people, the anguish when it stops and one leaves or, more often in this case, is left bereft. Joni Mitchell’s phrase from ‘Hejira’ – ”in our possessive coupling” – expresses the overall sense of this work and the fallout of lost love.
These feelings are wonderfully realised in Rafael Bonachela’s choreography, which begins set to Arca’s ‘Piel’ (translated roughly as ‘Take yesterday’s skin off me’). Six dancers – fresh for new adventures wearing today’s new skin – tumble over each other, being supported so that one might reach out to another across the space, intertwining and rolling over each other’s backs with legs extended, hard to tell which body belongs to whom. The dancers weave in and out of rippling, living sculptures, then dissolve into their individual bodies, only to coalesce again.
The attention is guided from grouping to grouping in ensemble numbers, and riveted to the two, or occasionally three, bodies in smaller designs. When all the women dance in unison – a stamping low centre of gravity that is almost haka, almost flamenco – it’s exhilarating. Physical references to flamenco arm positions punctuate the work and, towards the end, the whole company sits around the edges of the stage, lit so that we focus on their heads and arms, to perform a series of mesmerising, precise, ritualised head and arm gestures, with references as much to Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ as to Bonachela’s Spanish roots.
The last piece, ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ is danced by two male dancers (Ryan Pearson and Luke Hayward) and expresses the pain of loss in a way this reviewer has never seen choreographed before – visceral and shocking, and a bold way to finish the work
The costumes – shredded and fishnetty punk street/dance – are a sort of external depiction of the internal damage and scars that, inevitably, we all develop as a result of dealing with the love and loss experienced when we are intimate with other human beings.
Read: Theatre review: Love, Old Fitz Theatre
The entire company is uniformly excellent, all the more impressive when you realise that five of the dancers are new members – Mathilda Ballantyne, Mali Comlekci, Eka Perunicic, Sam Winkler and Sonrisa Hubbard, the last of whom made her professional debut on the opening night.
A wonderful achievement.
SOMOS
The Showroom, Arts Centre Melbourne
Sydney Dance Company
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Set and costume design: Kelsey Lee
Lighting design: Damien Cooper
Sound Mixing and Editing: Nick Wales
Dancers: Lucy Angel, Mathilda Ballantyne, Timmy Blankenship, Mali Comlekci, Naiara de Matos, Liam Green, Luke Hayward, Sonrisa Hubbard, Morgan Hurrell, Ngaere Jenkins, Sophie Jones, Ryan Pearson, Eka Perunicic, Amelia Russell, Piran Scott, Mia Thompson, Sam Winkler
Tickets: $80-$88
SOMOS will be performed until 23 March 2025.
