The reasons aren’t important
November 2012
When Sydney Dance Company tread the Arts Centre boards later this month with 2 One Another, audiences will be free not to get it. Indeed, as Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela suggests, there doesn’t have to be a reason. After all, it’s dance
Rafael Bonachela has seared in memories of the Arts Centre. On the opening night of Sydney Dance Company’s Melbourne season of We Unfold, the sound cut out. At first, everyone thought, arty silence? But no. Bonachela shudders involuntarily at the recall. “Actually that was one of the most terrifying experiences ever,” he confesses.
Two years on from tech glitch hell and Bonachela’s newest work, 2 One Another ‘unfolds’ before a huge LED screen and beneath split-second lighting changes. Indeed, as with all of Bonachela’s work, the show is much more than dance moves. “You have the steps, and that is the dance, but choreography is everything,” he declares. “I can have the most beautifully crafted piece of dance but if the lights and the costume aren’t right …” he shrugs to make the point, before adding, “The costume can kill a piece.”
Since the departure of Graeme Murphy and the tragic death of Tanya Liedke, the Barcelona born choreographer has steered Sydney Dance Company onto almost cinematic terrain. His work is intense and exhaustingly physical. The aforementioned We Unfold was about as emotionally immersive and breathtaking as contemporary dance gets. (Not even an unscheduled interruption could hide the fact.)
“I’m obviously someone who’s into the body,” Bonachela says matter-of-factly. “The physical, but also the emotional and the psychological. For me, I think that my work speaks about emotions and human relationships through a very intensely physical but abstract style of movement.”
The collision of concrete physicality and pure abstraction sits at the heart of dance, particularly in the post-War era, as contemporary practise has pushed the form into bold new shapes. As Bonachela explains it, “Dance is an artform that allows you and me to enter it from a different space and have a different experience. It can also be pure beauty, just that; and there’s nothing wrong with that. There doesn’t have to be a reason all of the time. The body itself is a reason. Movement is a reason.”
As a response to the eternal challenge of ‘narrative’ in dance, it’s refreshingly spare. “I don’t need a war to make a ballet or a book to make a dance about,” he adds. “All of my work has some idea and I draw from that; and then it becomes a dance. But for me, whether that idea is about the oceans or relationships or anything else, it’s not important.”
That’s right, Rafael Bonachela is quite happy for us remain unsure. “If there’s an intention behind my decisions and behind my dancers’ thinking I believe, and hope, that the audience will engage with it. I just can’t expect that everyone is going to get that reason.”
With 2 One Another the back story bedrock is very definitely in place; not just in terms of its overarching theme – relationships – but the philosophy behind its construction. “2 One Another started being about the people in the room,” Bonachela reveals. “All the inspiration came from the sixteen amazing dancers I had in front of me. So, just those individuals with their different experiences and different relationships, and this idea about how we relate; but also, how we don’t relate. This was my ground.”
The process of bringing the piece to life also involved Sydney poet Samuel Webster, who was invited to rehearsals to spontaneously write down his musings. These were then given to the dancers for a physical meta-interpretation. “It was an experiment,” Bonachela recounts. “I didn’t really know what would happen because I had never worked with a writer before. He wrote all these beautiful … more like sentences than a poem. Then, when we gave them to the dancers it just generated more and more ideas and that then became 2 One Another.”
Obviously Bonachela will be hoping that the final theatrical product (with its painstakingly conceived lighting, tailored original score, filmic backdrops and poetic inspiration) will reveal just enough of its complex heart; although he’s clearly not one for the conceptual over-share. “Where is imagination anymore? Does everything need to be signposted? Does everything need to be chewed for us?”
If there is a purist bent to that Rafael Bonachela instantly and adroitly up-ends it. “I keep saying that I just make steps and to a point it’s true,” he concludes. “For me, at the end of the day, whatever anybody thinks or doesn’t think … it’s a dance.”
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