Sydney Dance Company
SHARED FREQUENCIES
Sydney Theatre
March-April
A STRIKING blow was delivered in the battle for hearts and minds as Sydney Dance Company’s double bill, “Shared Frequencies”, opened at Sydney Theatre. The onslaught began with Italian choreographer Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models, which he describes as “the result of a small war declared against our alter-egos”. Godani shook the audience by the shoulders, threw them back in their seats and left them wanting more.
Raw Models is a highly engineered piece, intensified by the choreographer’s ability to create his own lighting and costume design. The dance is delivered in bursts punctuated by darkness. All the dancers wear sheer, dark hosiery and high necked leotards that leave the arms exposed, in alabaster contrast, to flail and flinch against Nord 48’s live, electronic score. Worn like an alien exoskeleton, the androgynous costuming gives the bodies an aggressive, super-human edge. Newcomer Andrew Crawford transforms into an alluring, strange and sleek specimen.
With stockinged feet dancers move stealthily on and off stage in blackout, disconcertingly disappearing and reappearing from nowhere. Four dancers morph into seven. Blackout. An imposing line of creatures moves downstage. Blackout. Headless beings lull against a black box wall, their arms limp with inertia. Godani manipulates “silence” and “darkness” as choreographic devices with relevance equal to movement.
Stylistically, he strips the body to its elegant essence, using movement like snap-on attachments. He exploits the plasticity of the spine with limbs actualising as extensions of the vertebrae. Working from the upper back, Godani rolls the shoulders forward, collapsing the chest. The dancers appear to be picked up and manipulated by an external force. They are amorphous forms possessed, generating dance of a different genre – dance as science fiction, dance as gothic horror.
The result is a delicious dichotomy where dancers are at once monstrous yet refined, foreign yet familiar. The piece is disturbingly compelling.
If Godani capturs minds, artistic director Bonachela aims straight for the heart. His LANDforms is by contrast distinctly human, languid and comforting. Against Godani’s menacing machine, Bonachela sculpts and shapes the body like clay.
As the work begins, Bonachela restrains the power of his dancers, drops their centre into the hips and, by suspending the line of energy at the wrists, creates softness to the hands. This produces a tremendous sense of weight that casts the company as a lumbering landscape, eons old.
With unified force, these clever, process-driven dancers delivered a carefully considered piece that ebbs and flows, building in intensity until bodies bound across the stage, then receding into an exquisitely sad, slow and soulful resolve. Only briefly did their skilful synchronicity ever slip.
Amidst Katie Noonan’s ambrosial soprano, a percussive rain hits the stage. In serene clarity, the dancers advance and recede through falling water as if in an eternal dance with the elements. The exploration of our emotional connection to the earth is complete and Bonachela’s collaborative project with composer, Ezio Bosso, is achieved. LANDforms caps off an excursion that has previously covered the ocean in We Unfold and air in 6 Breaths. A three-pronged attack – by land, sea and air.
Bonachela has engaged an arsenal to reach audiences: delivering Sydney world premieres; using live music and distributing free programs.
The coup de grâce however, resides in his generosity of spirit that has encouraged a “Shared Frequency” between high calibre collaborators.
– MICHELLE CUNEO