Sydney Dance Company’s Current brings together four works spanning two decades and sharply contrasting choreographic styles, all packed into a brisk 60-minute program.
Current opens with a reprise of one of Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela’s early works. E2 7SD, created in 2004 in London, was named after the East London suburb where he was living at that time. In many ways, it contained the germ of the company he would later shape: alongside winning the New York Bloomberg Choice Award, it gave Bonachela the freedom to launch his own company with the prize money.
Lucy Angel and Jai Fauchon play young lovers. The costumes reflect that blurred intimacy, with the dancers in shorts and singlets: they could have equally come from the gym, the street, the bed. The soundtrack echoes that pedestrian ambiguity, with street noise and audio clips of fragmented speech, catching portions of conversation. Both are dancers of substance and mass. Angel isn’t an object decoratively swept through space: she is one of two comparably formidable bodies using each other as structure and reciprocal force. Bonachela’s choreography doesn’t ask the dancers to perform ease. In the intimacy of the Neilson studio, you see their sweat, concentration and labour.
Next up is Alpha Mutt by Jenni Large, the Balnaves Artist in Residence at Sydney Dance Company for 2026. Alpha Mutt is vampire-slick slow-mo, dripping with syrupy body rolls and simulated sex. Large has form with the erotically charged and this time it’s Goth Pilates in a Berlin nightclub: pelvic tilts in backless pinstripe, chain-chokers, fingerless gloves, inverted bodies and inner thighs.
There’s menace in Large’s choreography. Dancers speed across the stage in steroidal crab-walks to Louis Frere-Harvey’s throbbing soundtrack – it’s dark, industrial, anthropomorphic. A blonde girl is held low and splayed in a sky-diving position, arms and legs raised at the wrong right angle from her torso, like a nocturnal insect. The choreography is flooded with reaching arms, opposing diagonals, bent knees, torsos pulled in different directions. The visual language is sexy, serious and severe: black costuming, flashes of skin, hard white floor, bodies folded and manipulated, receding into the deep, blue void.
Third is Azzam Mohamed’s OUR(SELF). Mohamed is a street dancer and that is where he thrives. Mohamed has no shortage of choreographic ambition, but having seen a few of his more recent performances, I’m less convinced his work has the imaginative heft needed to “break out” (excuse the pun) onto a broader stage. So far, it’s been all sizzle, no sausage.
One of the consistent concerns is a baffling disconnect between movement and music. Mohamed’s inspiration was the New York loft era of underground dance parties. The company is clad in streetwear-inflected ‘90s aesthetic: baggy jeans, track pants, loose t-shirts in blues, greys and washed-out neutrals. Dancers twist onto shoulders and cheeks, legs bicycling upwards into the air. There’s playfulness, eye contact and a street-battle vibe. Yet, jarringly, the music veers between soft elevator jazz and Tibetan chant. The ingredients have been assembled, but Mohamed seems determined to mix mustard with custard. The SDC dancers attack the material with formidable skill and commitment, but their virtuosity flatters choreography that gives them little of substance to work with. They keep performing dedicated CPR on a creation that has little pulse of its own. In this genre, Ali Dib and Mali Comlekci could resuscitate almost anything. Yet the boys from Bondi Rescue are still pounding down the beach with the defibrillator, and I’m not even sure if OUR(SELF) has a shockable rhythm.
Current saves the best – or at least the most exuberant – for last, in Raghav Handa’s ONE SONG, drawing on Indian kathak technique. It opens with Ryan Pearson entering the stage, wide-eyed and dishevelled, closely followed by Mathilda Ballantyne (Ballantyne originally trained at the Australian Ballet School and has the kind of feet that make teachers salivate). The slow start is a furphy – shortly after, the stage bursts to life: explosive, maximal and celebratory. The joy is barefoot and baked in, with dancers whirlpooling and propelling themselves metres above the stage, heads snapping back to meet their feet. The lighting tumbles between warm amber wash and saturated magenta. Ali Dib, shirt crossed diagonally over his torso, gives it his all. Sonrisa Hubbard is fine-boned and feline. There’s a communal ecstasy culminating in spontaneous whoops from the audience. The energy is a convulsing cross between J.Lo and Shakira’s Super Bowl halftime, and a bunch of kids who’ve made it 150km down a dirt track with some doof-doof speakers and party drugs, without being busted by the cops. Never mind that someone’s about to tumble down a ravine.
At a snappy 60 minutes, Current offers four distinct works and a lively tasting plate of contemporary dance: varied, accessible and over before it has any chance to outstay its welcome.
