Sydney Dance Company’s Somos has returned to Sydney for its second season. As Artistic Director and choreographer Rafael Bonachela tells it, Somos has two origins: Bonachela’s childhood in Spain (with memories of his father playing flamenco music in the car, while young Bonachela demanded Michael Jackson), combined with the company’s fruitless search to find a suitable performance venue, which, due to a lack of options, resulted in them stripping back and staging Somos in their rehearsal space on the wharf at Walsh Bay. In his speech at the opening night, Bonachela mentions both of his parents, thanking his mother for “helping me dance when boys didn’t dance,” and his father for instilling a love of Spanish and Latin music, “even if things didn’t work out so well between us.” True to form, Bonachela makes this final comment with a lightness that belies its grief.
Somos has a voyeuristic element, performed on a small, ground-level rectangular stage, with the audience seated in the round, eye level with the dancers. The performance begins with long red gauze strips, strung floor to ceiling around the stage, like bars on a tiger’s cage. The dancers preen their way into the space, with a feline beauty and movement that only heightens the feeling that we’re a crowd at a zoo. You can see the baby hairs on their thighs, hear them breathe. At one stage, Sam Winkler, who looks like The Vitruvian Man, weaving together the human and divine – all perfect proportions, intricate curls, and intimate stare – reaches out one elongated arm and almost brushes an audience member. Bonachela understands the power of proximity, instructing the dancers to make direct eye contact with the audience. They prowl behind the gauze bars, pick us off, one by one, flipping object with subject. Who’s being watched now? Who’s really on show?
Over the past twelve months, there has been a major changing of the guard, with the departure of powerhouses like Emily Seymour and Chloe Young, and the arrival of electrifying new dancers like Winkler and Mathilda Ballantyne. Perhaps as a testimony to experience, Liam Green, one of the few remaining longstanding company members, looks comfortable and commanding. Green’s duet with Sophie Jones is fluid and articulate; the trio of Luke Hayward, Riley Fitzgerald and Timmy Blankenship marries power with restraint. Watching Piran Scott and Naiara De Matos is always like being let in on a glorious secret. At times, the company harnesses all the intelligence, passion, and percussive power of the best of contemporary dance, with raw explosive emotion magnified through crystal sharp technique.
Speaking of movement, after the performance, it was announced that this season of Somos would be Mia Thompson’s last with the company. Thompson can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes. She has that remarkable ability to be completely captivating while appearing effortless. Even Thompson’s talents couldn’t quite save her duet with Ngaere Jenkins, which they both performed with a kind of plastered beauty pageant smile. In contrast, Ne Me Quitte Pas, with Ryan Pearson and Luke Hayward, is the dance version of Brokeback Mountain, where two men rage-duet against each other, grabbing handfuls of hair and throwing knees to the chest, in a triumvirate of love, aggression and addiction.
Maybe it’s intentional – Bonachela juxtaposing intensity with cheesy pop. Or maybe it’s the visceral childhood stamp of the flamenco versus ‘Hey Pretty Baby With the High Heels On’.
In the staging of Somos, there are obvious parallels between Bonachela growing up as a gay boy in Spain in the 1980s, shrinking into a space smaller than ideal, with all of the condensed intensity that might bring. I say might, perhaps because Somos feels slightly diluted; it leaves me wanting something more than it seems prepared to give. Despite moments of connection, and the undeniable commitment and skill of the dancers and choreography, Somos doesn’t quite leave everything on the dance floor. That’s not to say it’s not a show worth seeing: it absolutely is. Even at its most basic – which is 50 minutes of watching beautiful bodies at close range, to a curated Latin score, in mood lighting – there’s hardly room for complaint. Still, while Bonachela keeps the audience close in Somos, I’m not convinced he really lets us in. At its peak, just over the horizon, Somos could be truly transformative, but this Somos stops short of full revelation.
Even after seeing it twice, I can’t quite put my finger on Somos. Maybe, like the Vitruvian Man, that’s the point. Arms outstretched, but always just out of reach.
