Engine
Sydney Dance Company
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
June 26, 2026
Sydney Dance Company’s Engine is a triple bill that suits the Drama Theatre beautifully. In this intimate Opera House setting, the company’s precision, physical daring and collective charge can be seen at close range. The program brings together three distinct choreographic voices: Melanie Lane’s Love Lock, Fran Diaz’s The Mass Ornament, and Rafael Bonachela’s new work The Journey Itself Is Home. Across the evening, the dancers are asked for stamina, detail and stylistic agility, and they deliver with the kind of confidence that has become a company signature.
The evening opens strongly with Lane’s Love Lock, first seen in Sydney Dance Company’s 2024 program Twofold. It remains a rich and compelling work, and in this context feels even more assured. Lane draws from folk dance, social ritual and the pulse of contemporary club culture, creating a world that feels both ancient and futuristic. The dancers begin in glossy black costumes before Akira Isogawa’s designs gradually introduce flashes of colour, texture and individual character. These additions are playful and strange, giving the ensemble the look of a future tribe inventing its own customs.
There is something deeply pleasurable about the way Love Lock builds. Clark’s electronic score gives the work its throb and momentum, while Damien Cooper’s lighting carves out a space that feels both ceremonial and dreamlike. Lane’s choreography is full of groove, physical intelligence and sly humour. It allows the dancers to be both part of a collective and vividly themselves. The folk references never feel decorative; instead, they become a way of thinking about connection, repetition and desire. For me, it was the strongest work of the night.
Fran Diaz’s The Mass Ornament follows without interval, a tightly wound 13-minute work for 13 dancers. Its physical demands are immediately apparent. Dressed in dark green, the ensemble moves through patterns of precision, repetition and force, evoking drill, labour, synchronised spectacle and systems of control. Diaz is interested in collectivity, and there are striking images here: bodies arranged in sharp formations, limbs snapping into place, dancers surging and collapsing within the group.
Still, this was the least satisfying work of the program for me. Its conceptual frame is clear, and the dancers attack it with impressive discipline, but the work’s intensity can feel more imposed than developed. The sound design, based on Henryk Górecki with additional composition by Tom Foskett-Barnes, is deliberately overwhelming, and while that pressure is part of the experience, it sometimes flattens the nuance within the choreography. The piece is never dull, and there is no question of the dancers’ commitment, but among the three works it felt the most closed, offering less emotional range and fewer moments of genuine surprise.
After interval, Bonachela’s The Journey Itself Is Home brings the evening into a different register. Set to a new score by Bryce Dessner, with set and costumes by Kelsey Lee and lighting by Damien Cooper, the work has a luminous, reflective quality. A mirrored floor and glowing celestial backdrop place the dancers in a world that seems suspended between landscape and memory.
Bonachela’s choreography has naturally shaped the company’s particular strengths: speed, articulation, musicality, attack and an almost sculptural clarity through the torso. Here, those qualities are still present, but softened by a sense of tenderness. Solos and duets emerge from the larger group and fold back into it, suggesting both solitude and belonging. The dancers appear as individuals within a shared current, each distinct but never separate from the whole.
There is a sense, too, of this work as a love letter to the company itself. As Bonachela approaches the final stretch of his long artistic leadership, The Journey Itself Is Home reads as a meditation on the ensemble he has shaped and the dancers who continue to carry that language forward. It is not sentimental, but it is generous. It gives the company room to breathe.
As a program, Engine is at its best when it reveals the many ways a group can move together: as ritual, as system, as community, as company. The middle work may not have matched the richness of the pieces around it, but the evening as a whole is powered by exceptional dancing and a strong sense of occasion. In the Drama Theatre, Sydney Dance Company looks close, alive and in full flight.
Engine - A Company in Full Flight
Sydney Dance Company
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
June 26, 2026
Sydney Dance Company’s Engine is a triple bill that suits the Drama Theatre beautifully. In this intimate Opera House setting, the company’s precision, physical daring and collective charge can be seen at close range. The program brings together three distinct choreographic voices: Melanie Lane’s Love Lock, Fran Diaz’s The Mass Ornament, and Rafael Bonachela’s new work The Journey Itself Is Home. Across the evening, the dancers are asked for stamina, detail and stylistic agility, and they deliver with the kind of confidence that has become a company signature.
The evening opens strongly with Lane’s Love Lock, first seen in Sydney Dance Company’s 2024 program Twofold. It remains a rich and compelling work, and in this context feels even more assured. Lane draws from folk dance, social ritual and the pulse of contemporary club culture, creating a world that feels both ancient and futuristic. The dancers begin in glossy black costumes before Akira Isogawa’s designs gradually introduce flashes of colour, texture and individual character. These additions are playful and strange, giving the ensemble the look of a future tribe inventing its own customs.
There is something deeply pleasurable about the way Love Lock builds. Clark’s electronic score gives the work its throb and momentum, while Damien Cooper’s lighting carves out a space that feels both ceremonial and dreamlike. Lane’s choreography is full of groove, physical intelligence and sly humour. It allows the dancers to be both part of a collective and vividly themselves. The folk references never feel decorative; instead, they become a way of thinking about connection, repetition and desire. For me, it was the strongest work of the night.
Fran Diaz’s The Mass Ornament follows without interval, a tightly wound 13-minute work for 13 dancers. Its physical demands are immediately apparent. Dressed in dark green, the ensemble moves through patterns of precision, repetition and force, evoking drill, labour, synchronised spectacle and systems of control. Diaz is interested in collectivity, and there are striking images here: bodies arranged in sharp formations, limbs snapping into place, dancers surging and collapsing within the group.
Still, this was the least satisfying work of the program for me. Its conceptual frame is clear, and the dancers attack it with impressive discipline, but the work’s intensity can feel more imposed than developed. The sound design, based on Henryk Górecki with additional composition by Tom Foskett-Barnes, is deliberately overwhelming, and while that pressure is part of the experience, it sometimes flattens the nuance within the choreography. The piece is never dull, and there is no question of the dancers’ commitment, but among the three works it felt the most closed, offering less emotional range and fewer moments of genuine surprise.
After interval, Bonachela’s The Journey Itself Is Home brings the evening into a different register. Set to a new score by Bryce Dessner, with set and costumes by Kelsey Lee and lighting by Damien Cooper, the work has a luminous, reflective quality. A mirrored floor and glowing celestial backdrop place the dancers in a world that seems suspended between landscape and memory.
Bonachela’s choreography has always understood this company’s particular strengths: speed, articulation, musicality, attack and an almost sculptural clarity through the torso. Here, those qualities are still present, but softened by a sense of tenderness. Solos and duets emerge from the larger group and fold back into it, suggesting both solitude and belonging. The dancers appear as individuals within a shared current, each distinct but never separate from the whole.
There is a sense, too, of this work as a love letter to the company itself. As Bonachela approaches the final stretch of his long artistic leadership, The Journey Itself Is Home reads as a meditation on the ensemble he has shaped and the dancers who continue to carry that language forward. It is not sentimental, but it is generous. It gives the company room to breathe.
As a program, Engine is at its best when it reveals the many ways a group can move together: as ritual, as system, as community, as company. The middle work may not have matched the richness of the pieces around it, but the evening as a whole is powered by exceptional dancing and a strong sense of occasion. In the Drama Theatre, Sydney Dance Company looks close, alive and in full flight.
-Olivia Weeks