This double bill from Sydney Dance Company is unmissable

Twofold
Roslyn Packer Theatre, September 18
Until September 28
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★★

Sydney Dance Company confirms its world-class status in this dazzling, superhuman double bill. First up is a revival of Impermanence, Rafael Bonachela’s exploration of human and ecological transience. Premiering to acclaim in 2021, on second viewing it’s equally excellent.

Impermanence is powered by a driving, textured score for string quartet by Bryce Dessner. He is best known for fronting Grammy-winning Cincinnati rock band The National, but his Impermanence score is a different beast: dramatic, refined, and full of clever techniques for classical string instruments.

This double bill is Sydney Dance Company at its best.Credit: Pedro Greig

Soaring melodies are adorned with slow-building visceral thrills: aggressive pizzicato and col legno (striking the strings with the wood of the bow). The instruments are amplified so there’s an unusual intimacy to the music – you hear every string vibration, every delicate shudder of timber. It’s performed masterfully by the Australian String Quartet, playing on stage among the dancers.

Impermanence displays some of Bonachela’s finest choreography: achingly beautiful, fluid shapes that power across the stage with breathtaking athleticism and sophisticated musicality. There’s a ham-fisted unnecessary coda, but apart from that single lapse Impermanence is SDC at the top of its game.

Performance-wise, there are no weak links: you’re unlikely to find a better dance company in Australia right now. Every SDC artist moves with the strength, precision, and artistry of another company’s soloists or principals. In unison – showcasing that special SDC brand of attack, disciplined in synchronicity and tremendous in strength and agility – the effect is almost overwhelming. Keep an eye out for Naiara de Matos’ emotional depth, and the dynamism of Emily Seymour, one of the best dancers on the Australian stage.

Next comes Love Lock, choreographed with electric intelligence by Melanie Lane. It’s inspired by pop love songs and set to a playful score by British electronic artist Clark, featuring a nostalgic, quirky aesthetic best described as tribal chic. Much-loved designer and long-time SDC collaborator Akira Isogawa designed the costumes. His fantastical creations – shining leather, floating ruffles, and painted unitards – drench Love Lock in vibrant haute couture glamour.

Lane has an uncanny ability to stretch your space-time perceptions and make live dance feel like a gorgeously filmed, addictive music video. The dancers look like they’re on a time loop reel of film, or staring at a camera replaying in slow motion, or dancing against a backdrop shifting in and out of focus. It’s ingenious – don’t miss it.

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PLENTY OF FISH IN THE SEA
New Theatre, September 19
Until September 21
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

Just when you’re ready to scream at the endless earnest, predictable, naturalistic plays cluttering our stages, along comes Plenty of Fish in the Sea. It’s a timely reminder that theatre need not be so desperate to fulfil its dull aspiration of merely ticking the box marked “relevance”: that there are other fish to fry, if you will; that theatre can also be daring, imaginative and impish.

Plenty of Fish delights with images of such power as to sear your optic nerve, or with constantly surprising and sometimes exhilarating music. It can also trigger uproarious laughter even while it causes you to think.

Madeline Baghurst plays a French nun.Credit: Geoff Magee Photography

A particular strength of the play is that it doesn’t do your thinking for you. It confronts you with images, words, music and metaphors, and you puzzle out your own meaning. You may even decide not to worry whether it’s “about” anything but just ride the waves of wonder and laughter, of surrealism and clowning, and take it all at face value.

It was devised and directed by Clockfire Theatre Company’s Emily Ayoub and Madeline Baghurst, who are joined by Christopher Samuel Carroll to perform it. Baghurst plays a French nun, Ayoub a mute cook, and Carroll, a shipwreck survivor who is reeled in by the nun and then taught to fish. The metaphor lies with dating, specifically online dating, and its addictive potential to want to reel in more and more fish until one is sexually gorged.

Yet with Baghurst exclusively speaking French, Ayoub mute, and Carroll the more passive character, much of the “story” is conveyed by mime, clowning and other physical acting, while the performers endlessly reconfigure a wardrobe, bed and picture frame for scene changes, including one where the bed miraculously becomes a boat.

It can verge on silliness but is predominantly performed with such absolute conviction as to evade that fate and is expertly reinforced by Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s design, Daniel Herten’s music and sound design and Victor Kalka’s exceptional lighting, with Kate Gaul as artistic producer. The upshot is involving, funny and magical.

Lasting just 45 minutes, it has been honed at other fringe festivals until the sound, lights, words and performances are as tight and harmonised as a string quartet. You could see a thousand plays and encounter nothing like this.

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Australian Chamber Orchestra
City Recital Hall, September 17
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

Pelimannit (Fiddlers) by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara sets the concert’s theme – it’s violin playing, Jim, but not as we know it. Rautavaara’s suite builds on dances by 18th-century folk fiddler Samuel Rinda-Nickola and begins with a series of nonchalant solos before moving on to playfully painful dissonances, like a school band not quite ready for public exposure. The five movements became morose, dreamy and frenetic by turns with plenty of droll wit, wry grimaces and hyperactive hijinks.

Then came an arresting new work by Adelaide composer Jakub Jankowski that, in places, used wooden comb bows specially designed for the piece. It began with the ACO players holding their bows outstretched like teachers of another age about to administer punishment, leading to a guttural cry from the whole orchestra.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra pushed the boundaries of the violin sound in this program.Credit: Nic Walker

A simple descending minor key melody emerged, which I took to be the Ukrainian folksong Verbovaya Doshchechka referred to in the program. In Jankowski’s setting, this melody emerged through tumult and anguish. After a quiet section of eerie peace agitated by gentle fluttering, the admonitory silent bow strokes returned, this time apparently to signal complete changes of texture each time one was brought down.

The work’s overall impact was of intriguing strangeness taking some of the more mysterious moods of Rautavaara suite into the irrational world of dreams. The first half finished with ACO Director Richard Tognetti taking the solo part in Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor.

Although the program didn’t indicate the use of gut strings, the sound had their characteristic airy lightness, avoiding brilliance and strong projection. The tempi in the outer movements were quick and in the first movement this gave the phrasing graceful buoyancy. Far from stepping forward in solo passages, Tognetti withdrew to inner delicacy.

In the slow movement the intimate solos against gruffer orchestral passages recalled the famous description of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto - Orpheus taming the wild beasts.

Illumine by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir began with the still purity of a single sustained note interrupted by cavernous sounds from lower strings. The sustained notes evolved, with halting awkward movement, leading back to stillness in the very highest register, with the lower sounds now more intermittent like a distant object banging in the wind.

To end, the whole texture evaporated upward to ethereal nothingness. In Mendelssohn’s Octet for strings in E-flat major, Opus 20, Tognetti, taking the soloistic first violin part, again resisted steely projection despite the part’s Romantic virtuosity. In the finale the playing was deftly energised, engaged and propulsive, though the ratio of bow noise to tone was high in quick textures creating a somewhat scrubbed quality. Not as we know it, but not without interest.

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