SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY’S ASCENT

DANCE

2 Sept

Recently landed: High Flyers

Gracia’s written response to Sydney Dance Company’s Ascent, especially for Fjord Review.

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The porous borders of Rafael Bonachela’s I Am-Ness, Marina Mascarell’s The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird, and Antony Hamilton’s Forever & Ever, when viewed as a collective, make a visionary trance, as Sydney Dance Company’s triple bill “Ascent” inhabits the stage at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne. Commissioned by and having premiered at the Canberra Theatre Centre at the beginning of the year, followed by Sydney Opera House, and a national tour, the invitation to weave together three strands and construct a whole, should you choose, is now extended to Melbourne audiences.

Nestled within the theatre, on a rainy Wednesday night, with a meditation for violin and strings, where the spiritual and temporal meet, things begin. When Pēteris Vasks’s composed the soothing quietude of his Lonely angel he described it as being in response to seeing “an angel, flying over the world; [who] looks at the world’s condition with grieving eyes, [and with] an almost imperceptible, loving touch of [their] wings brings comfort and healing.” The resulting piece is “music after the pain” and it proves a beautiful cloak for Bonachela’s new work, I Am-Ness, and the freedom frequently found in Bonachela’s work to interpret the terrestrial or celestial spheres as you will.

Through the soft haze cast by the lightning design of Damien Cooper, I see a cathedral chamber pierced by light wells above. An expansive cave cathedral, with a large entrance chamber, becomes a world for Madeline Hams, Naiara Silva De Matos, Riley Fitzgerald, and Piran Scott to rest and flit within. They become part consoler and consoled, angel and human, violin and strings, moving body and creative mind, as they flow and unfurl. So long as they are ever in flux, and in harmony with each other, they can be situated in either role and realm. In this continuous constellation, Bonachela’s choreography sees “the dancers cross fault lines with a euphoric tenderness”[i]. Like the composition, I Am-Ness serves as a lasting, calming balm that bellies its brevity.
[i] Rafael Bonachela, ‘A note from Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela’, Sydney Dance Company’s Ascent 2023 National Program, https://issuu.com/sydneydancecompany/docs/ascent_program_national_tour, p. 9, accessed 31st August, 2023.