Poetry In Motion

In creating his first full-length work since 2010's We Unfold, Sydney Dance Company's artistic director, Rafael Bonachela, wanted to a make a big show. “I want audiences to feel that 'wow',” says the dancer/choreographer, whose third major work with the SDC, 2 One Another, opens in Melbourne in November.

To create his big 'wow', Bonachela brought together an impressive team including Brisbane Festival creative director Tony Assness. “He's not afraid of 'big',“ notes Bonachela. The music is by Nick Wales, a close friend Bonachela has delayed working with in order to avoid any charges of cronyism.

2 One Another explores and expresses human relationships. This theme could so easily expand into something very abstract, so how did Bonachela narrow his ideas down in order to grasp something concrete to start with? “It had to come from the room,” he explains, meaning the rehearsal room. “It had to be about us, drawing from within.” He gave himself a rule – to focus solely on the relationships between his troupe of dancers. 2 One Another comes from his observing their interactions. “For three-and-a-half years I have worked with talented inspiring individuals,” he notes. “Wonderful human beings. The work is fed from that interaction. 2 One Another is about them: about who they are, their presences. As a group they are united and strong.” 2 One Another includes Helpmann Award winner Charmene Yap and nominee Chen Wen.

Bonachela's seeing his dancers as 'bodies' has fed the work in terms of creating the choreography, something that extends into looking at non-dance movement. “In January last year I had two injured dancers on the floor,” he remembers. “I spent three days looking around, looking at different interactions, capturing gestures, the different looks between two people, those small detailed general phrases – all of these are triggers I use to create a dance.”

Uniquely, 2 One Another is a work developed in close collaboration with a poet, Sam Webster, who was there watching and writing throughout. “He wrote pages and pages,” Bonachela recalls. “He wrote great stuff looking at us interacting, creating a vocabulary. His sentences became dance movements; we gave them to the dancers to find their essence. He saw me and another dancer improvising on the floor, feeding from each other and made a beautiful abstract sentence. ”

With such vast creative resources available to him, isn't there a temptation for Bonachela to want to tell his own stories? “There are a lot more interesting stories than mine!” he says. He emphasises the dances he creates will be inspired by something but are never simply about something. “The end result becomes something else, something more than doing something about something,” he continues. “It becomes something new, something squished out of that feeling or that emotion.”

2 One Another has had a season in Sydney, resonating with audiences in intensely personal ways, judging by the responses Bonachela has received. “Everyone has their own world view from their own life experiences that they've been through,” he continues. “Those moments of, 'Oh my god, that happened to me!' It might not be what I wanted to say… Their experiences give meaning to things.”