Sydney Dance Company, Ascent Review ★★★★★

Australia’s foremost contemporary dance troupe, Sydney Dance Company, has been under the artistic direction of the Spaniard Rafael Bonachela since 2009, and naturally its repertoire has acquired something of his own versatility: a dancer and choreographer, over the years Bonachela has worked across all manner of artistic platforms, including pop and art installations.

Ascent is made up of three very different works, ranging from the academic to the truly outlandish. First comes Bonachela’s own I Am-Ness, a quartet set to Lonely Angel, a gentle, meditative piece for strings by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks.

Sydney Dance Company, I Am-Ness. Photo: Pedro Greig
Surrounded by the blue-tinged penumbra of Damien Cooper’s lighting design, two men and two women move restlessly forming groups that immediately dissolve and re-form differently, its lifts not confined to the usual man/woman combination, but rather gender-less. Bonachela described I Am-Ness as ‘a state of being in one breath’ and this short piece is indeed danced as if in one sustained, unbroken breath.

The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird is something else. The work of the Spanish choreographer Marina Mascarell, now the artistic director of Danish Dance Theatre, it’s a concept-heavy piece that relies on the relationship between its cast of six and a complicated set of ropes and large pieces of cloth, designed by Lauren Brincat and Leah Giblin.

Sydney Dance Company, The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird. Photo: Pedro Greig
Billed as ‘a journey of some bodies towards the unknown, as mutant creatures in an oneiric valley’ (no, me neither), it has moments of scenic beauty, reminiscent perhaps of ancient Greek sailors at sea in their flimsy galleys caught in a violent Mediterranean storm, trying too keep control of sails battered by the wind.

Apart from creating a variety of configurations with the ropes and the sails, however, this piece goes nowhere. There’s no development, no story-telling, nor indeed any obvious connection with Nick Wales’s score, punctuated by the appealing calls of exotic birds.

The programme ends with Forever & Ever (pictured top), a Helpman Award-winning piece by Antony Hamilton, set to a repetitive percussion score by The Presets’ Julian Hamilton, the choreographer’s brother.

A piece for the whole 16-strong company, Hamilton threw everything and the kitchen sink at it, from basic contemporary movements through to vogueing and much else besides, all underlined by Paula Levis’s ever-changing outlandish, visually aggressive costumes.

The score relies on a repeated, unchanging sequence of beats, ta-ta - tatatata - ta in a variety of sonorities, that soon become quite tedious. As indeed, and for all of the dancers’ commendable efforts, does this seemingly never ending piece, though I’m sure that’s not what the choreographer meant when he named it Forever & Ever.