Melbourne Reviews

This year’s offering from Sydney Dance Company, Ascent, is something old and two things new. It’s a triple bill of three diverse styles, each dance successful in its own way and all performed with the expected SDC technical panache.   

Artistic director Rafael Bonachela’s work is often front and centre in a SDC program, but here it’s a prelude of sorts. I Am-Ness is a short (15 minute) quartet opening the evening. On a barren, unadorned stage, a fog envelopes four dancers who repeatedly melt together in curveous forms and then burst apart.

It’s sensous, brooding and sinuey all at once, with the strings of Peteris Vasks's composition adding to the tension. A monochrome in both design and pace keeps a sustained mood that never breaks, regardless of the oozing push-pull of the physicality.  

It’s very different to Marina Mascarell’s The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird, which, once you get past the cryptic name, intrigues for its mix of human interaction with art installation. Seven dancers move with and within a collage of hanging nylons (evoking flags, parachutes, ship sails) that fashion a disheveled textile sculpture spilling across the entire stage. Unlike Bonachela’s work, the dancers constantly shift states and energies, full of existential angst one moment and then unadulterated calm the next.

Nick Wales’s score – punctuated with bird sounds, light static and water droplets is atmospheric rather than imposing, allowing the set (design by Lauren Brincat and Leah Giblin) to be the focus with the fabrics taking on roles of their own, shaping the trajectories of the dancers.

Both Bonachela and Mascarell’s works premiered in March, when the Ascent tour got underway in Canberra. Forever & Ever by Antony Hamilton was already a tried and true success, having been made for a 2018 Sydney season and then going on to win a Helpmann award for best choreography. 

After an amazingly detailed solo by Jessie Scales, Forever & Ever becomes processional lines of hooded dancers, robed head to toe either black or white and sporting cones for hands. It slowly builds to complex geometric patterns and various costume changes revealing lots of skin in clubby, angular outfits accented with bold yellow. 

Hamiliton (who is the artistic director of Chunky Move) is known for works more performance art than straight dance, engaging hip hop, club culture and pop references. Forever & Ever has all those things and is one of his best works, as it displays super tight and engaging sections of large ensemble dancing alongside big props and showy light effects. The electronic music (by Julian Hamilton from The Presets) creates the hypnotic drive that propels the dancing faster and faster, building to fun and frenzy and back down again.

It's a brilliant finish to Ascent's diverse line up that has something for all different contemporary dance tastes.

Melbourne is the end of Ascent's national tour, but now SDC heads to Europe with a different program including Forever & Ever.

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