Artistic Director of Sydney Dance Company Rafael Bonachela brings together two perfectly counterpointed works to create Untamed. With its monochromatic lighting and percussive sampled sound palette, Gabrielle Nankivell’s Wildebeest, the first piece in the evening’s program, stands in high contrast to Bonachela’s own Anima, featuring lyrical instrumental music and intense, eye-boggling use of saturated colour.
Wildebeest began life as a commission for the inaugural season of New Breed in 2014. New Breed is a program initiated by Sydney Dance Company, in partnership with Carriageworks, with the aim of developing promising young Australian choreographers. With Wildebeest Sydney Dance Company begins to reap the rewards from investing in this program.
The new reworked version of Wildebeest shows that Nankivell is a talented choreographer with great potential. The elements of the piece, the movement, the use of the space, the stunning electronic sound score from former dancer Luke Smiles, and the moody lighting from Benjamin Cistern, all come together to create a whole more powerful than the sum of its parts. There are moments in the work when the sound, lighting and movement combine to make your spine tingle. This ability to conjure and create magic in live performance is rare and exciting, and it will be interesting to watch for Nankivell’s work in future. Sydney Dance Company and Carriageworks deserve credit for nurturing and developing Nankivell through their New Breed program.
The second work of the evening, Anima, sees Bonachela moving into new territory. After his masterful work Lux Tenebris, a dark dystopian work with an electronic sound score created for Countermove, the last Sydney Dance Company season, his new work explores a new dynamic, inviting spectators into a world of heady colour and sweeping lyricism.
Anima is set to music by Dobrinka Tabakova. This music, with its lush sweeps of strings soon becomes over-prescriptive, leaving little space for the intricacies and subtleties of interchange between movement and sound that mark out Bonachela’s work at its best.
Anima is accompanied by a video from Clemens Habicht which, while never dominating the dancers or the choreography, is hesitant to contribute much beyond a shifting blurring backdrop of soft colour to the piece. The truly exhilarating, intense celebration of colour visible in this work came from Cisterne’s stunning lighting which, through its use of saturated complementary colours, interacted with the choreography to sear the afterimage of the dancers deep into the retina of the spectator.
The dancing throughout the program was wonderful, showing extraordinary commitment, athleticism and rigour from all the dancers. Untamed demonstrates in spades that the dancers in Sydney Dance Company are world class.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Untamed
Sydney Dance Company
October 22, Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney
Wildebeest
Choreography: Gabrielle Nankivell
Sound Design: Luke Smiles
Lighting: Benjamin Cisterne
Costumes: Fiona Holley
Anima
Choreography: Rafael Bonachela in collaboration with the dancers
Music: Dobrinka Tabakova
Video: Clemens Habicht
Lighting: Benjamin Cisterne
Costumes: Aleisa Jelbart
Photograph of Anima by Pedro Greig
