Dance
In Rafael Bonachela’s reworked production of Somos for Sydney Dance Company, the force and frailty of the flesh is on full display. By Neha Kale.
The tension is palpable in Sydney Dance Company’s Somos
These lithe and powerful bodies speak without talking. They telegraph their feelings through the intensity of their movements, how they come together and part to a jolting, staccato rhythm. It’s as if, by closing the space between them, they are yielding to a secret source of energy that’s fraught with both pleasure and risk.
They stride towards each other and he holds her face, lifts her up, lets her fall. She ricochets from side to side, her shoulders and torso graceful even in this moment of surrender, this decision to submit to another person: the curse of romantic love. The specifics are unimportant, the language instantly recognisable.
A beat later, their dynamic turns. She leads him across the stage in a series of balletic leaps, tumbling across his back after tugging him towards her. The music, “Gallo Rojo, Gallo Negro” by the Catalan singer Sílvia Pérez Cruz, swells in the background, the violins rising and falling. Now their bodies are on the ground, pinwheeling through space, mirroring each other. Proximity has worked its spell. The distance between them dissolves.
This duet, featuring the dancers Piran Scott and Naiara de Matos – who are partnered in real life – appears near the beginning of Somos, conceived for Sydney Dance Company by artistic director and choreographer Rafael Bonachela. The title of the work, devised in Madrid and Sydney in 2023 and returning this year with new music and choreography, is Spanish for “we are”.
Over 50 minutes, it blurs the lines between audience and performer, self and other. We encounter the inner realm in which we nurse our desires and the outer world that often fails to meet them – the lover that doesn’t want us, the dream that slips out of our grasp, the relationship that leaves us bruised and raw, contemplating our jagged edges alone.
In Somos – a series of solos, duets, trios and chorus sequences – the body is always a puzzle piece, reaching, longing and yearning. The lighting – a moody, sultry haze executed artfully by Damien Cooper – illuminates the dancers’ biceps, chests and thighs as limbs wind around each other and interlock. The force and frailty of the flesh is on full display, as earthy and hotly visceral as a Renaissance fresco.
Somos is staged in the round at the Sydney Dance Company’s black box Neilson Studio. As it begins, the dancers prowl onto the stage one at a time to sound that rises and falls, its pitch growing higher and higher like a cosmic dirge. It’s an arrangement by composer Nick Wales of “Piel”, by the Venezuelan electronic producer Arca, one of 12 songs from the Spanish-speaking world that are assembled here with a wild disregard for borders or hierarchy.
The atmosphere is hushed, near reverent. A dancer holds our gaze, her focus electric. Two men furl and unfurl, melting into each other, toes pointed. Elsewhere is a tug of war, the knot of bodies caught between tension and release, the sound of grunts, drawn breaths so audible that it’s hard not to blush. The presence of eros – not just the idea of sex, which ripples through this show, but its older definition, something closer to life force – is palpable.
Somos features five dancers performing for the first time with the company among its cast of 18. Costumed by Kelsey Lee, they wear fishnets, lace and mesh, costumes exposing swathes of skin that evoke either a nightclub or a bordello. Lee also designed the sleek, minimalist set, lined with strips of neon. Initially the dancers move behind red-gauze ribbons. Their movements are so immediate we can hear them, almost touch them, but a veil divides us even through the promise of intimacy.
We live in a world that trades in exposure, in the performance of vulnerability, but so often this feels oddly narcissistic. Exposure so often is shallow and one-sided, part of a culture that perceives relationships as transactions. But what is more seductive – or electric – than conjuring our secret selves, offering all that is hidden or dark or abject, in the hope that another will rise up to meet it?
Throughout the show the dancers fling and catch each other, as if there were invisible strings binding them. I’m confronted again and again with trust in its most physical form. In one of my favourite sequences, the beguiling Mia Thompson, in her final season for the company, circles her interlocutor, Ngaere Jenkins. They arc backwards and forwards. One dancer cradles the other tenderly. There’s a cycle of retraction and attraction, the lines of their bodies sinuous and deliberate, every gesture deeply felt. There isn’t a false note in the movement. To watch this excavation of feeling is oddly thrilling.
Thompson and Jenkins dance to “Volver, volver”, a cover of a Mexican ranchera by Concha Buika, the shapeshifting Spanish singer who flits between jazz, pop and rumba. The ranchera is traditionally sung by women and charts heartbreak and love, the historic domain of the feminine.
Somos is influenced by Pedro Almodóvar’s “cinema of women”. In a moving speech on opening night, Bonachela – who was born in La Garriga, a small town north of Barcelona – spoke about his mother’s love of rancheras, and of listening to his father, who grew up with the machismo of Franco’s Spain, play flamenco on the radio. Back then, and for most of his adult life, he didn’t connect with these laments to loss and longing. The power of flamenco only hit him later.
As a young, broke choreographer in London, Bonachela watched Almodóvar films. The Spanish director’s vision – which often charts the interiority of women and how emotional expression persists in a culture that abhors it – served as a bridge to what he’d left behind. In an Almodóvar film, the colour red stands in for blood, for desire, for the parts of ourselves that we conceal. In Volver (2006), for example, Penélope Cruz plays Raimunda, a working-class mother in the suburbs of Madrid who protects her daughter from trauma. She often appears in a red cardigan.
Towards the end of the show, before a duet by Ryan Pearson and Luke Hayward, in which the men writhe around each other, carrying out the most exquisite kind of combat, the dancers sit on the edge of the stage. Their bodies jerk in time to “De Plata” by Rosalia, a Spanish pop star who blends flamenco with hip-hop. In the electricity of their movements, there’s a kind of distance. It’s not an expression of vulnerability but rather something just as courageous: the attempt to cross a chasm that might be unbridgeable, the effort to get close nearly as poignant as the closeness itself.
Somos is at the Neilson Studio at Sydney Dance Company until April 13.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 5, 2025 as "Close encounters".
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